Thermodynamic investigation and hydrate inhibition of real gas flow through orifice during depressurization

A thermodynamic procedure has been proposed which can be used to predict the gas pressure, temperature and flow rate through orifice upon chock flow condition, using equation of state (EOS). The procedure applied for emergency depressurization operation incorporating the Peng-Robinson EOS and validated by comparing flow rates of a multi-component hydrocarbon gas mixture for thirteen experimental cases. The average absolute deviations of the predicted flow rates for orifice discharge coefficients of 0.85 and 0.9, are 7.36% and 2.03%, respectively. The corresponding error for API 520 (American Petroleum Institute Recommendation Practice 520) method is 6.91%. In this work, the hydrate formation temperature and hydrate inhibitor type and its required weight fraction for preventing the hydrate formation upon orifice and its upstream conditions are evaluated by the EZ-Thermo software using the Moshfeghian–Maddox method. The results qualitatively show that the hydrate prevention is essential for the safety of the operation due to low temperature condition.