(281j) Experimental Studies for the Effect of Pressure Drop Across Horizontal Pipe and Control Valve in Series: Comparison with ASPEN

The contact of two or more immiscible fluids is encountered widely in the chemical and petroleum industries; among this two-phase gas- liquid flow through pipes and valves is a complex process. One of the problems that are hardly understood is how the two phases are distributed among the pipe lines and control valves. Studies on operating characteristics of control valves with two phase flow have not been given much attention in the literature despite its industrial importance during the design and selection as well as plant operations. However, a considerable work has been performed to study the pressure drop effects in two phase flow through pipes and different geometrical shapes of flow ducts. In this current work an experimental facility has been set up to study the pressure drop characteristics in a horizontal pipe and control valve in series under two phase flow conditions. By using the commercial ASPEN PLUS 11.1 package were employed to compare the experimental results. To calculate the simulated the pressure drop in pipe and control valve, for the typical fluid system of water, kerosene, diesel, palm oil separately (liquid phase) with the air (gas phase). The pressure drop characteristics are studied at constant valve position over a range of liquid flow rates from 50 LPH to 150 LPH and the gas flow rate varied from 25LPH to100 LPH. The above procedure were repeated for different valve openings (25% to 100%) The numerical results were validated against experimental data. The prediction of the pressure drop characteristics in pipe and valve were within an average error of about ±8 %. Comparisons of experimental and simulated profiles were found to be in good agreement.