Computation of Turbulent Flows in Natural Gas Pipes with Different Rectifiers

Abstract

With the development of natural gas industry, improving the accuracy of the flowmeter systems is becoming the common concerned problem both corporations and customers. Many experiments demonstrated that the different flow field structures of pipes with diverse baffle installations had great influence on the performance of flowmeters. In order to measure the flux in pipes more accurate, the flowmeters must be installed downstream the baffles far away so that the irregular flows induced by baffles had less influence on the flowmeters. For example, CFD was used to compute the flow fields of a diffusive pipe with different rectifiers in this paper. The lengths of the irregular flows induced by the diffuser and the rectifiers were shown in flow fields. By analysis and comparison the numerical results, the rectification of the different rectifier were confirmed. Furthermore, the experiments will be done soon with PIV to verify the numerical results. If the numerical results are in good agreement with the experiments, the conclusions derived from CFD will become the leading guidance to deal with the local flowmeter selection and installation in the future.