Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Jayanthi Vijay Sarathy, M.E, CEng, MIChemE, Chartered Chemical Engineer, IChemE, UK
Natural Gas Pipelines often suffer from transfer coefficient is taken to be 25 W/m2.K.
production losses due to hydrate plugging. The ambient temperature is 120C. The
For an effective hydrate plug to form, factors hydrate formation temperature for the
can vary from pipeline operating pressure composition is experimentally estimated to
and temperature, presence of water below its be 500F at 325 psia. It is required to estimate
dew point, extreme winter conditions & Joule the pipeline exit temperature & the hydrate
Thomson cooling. In the event hydrates form formation temperature along the pipeline. For
in the pipeline section, their consequence the estimates, the Joule-Thomson coefficient
depends on how well the hydrates is assumed to be an average of 5.60C/bar
agglomerate to grow and form a column. If throughout the pipeline. The natural gas
the pipeline section temperature is only at composition is as follows,
par with the hydrate formation temperature, Table 1. Gas Mixture [GPSA, Sec 20, Page 20-15]
the particles do no agglomerate; instead they
Mol% MW [Mi] yiMi
have to cross the metastable region which is Component
of the order of 50C to 60C, before hydrate [%] [kg/kmol] [-]
formation accelerates to block the pipeline. Methane 78.40 16.04 12.58
Page 1 of 3
U = Overall HTC [W/m2.K] Results
ID = Pipeline OD [m] Substituting the values to arrive at the
pipeline temperature profile, the gas specific
m = mass flow rate [kg/s]
gravity is estimated as,
L = Pipeline length [m] 20.08
𝛾𝑔 = 28.9625 = 0.6933 (7)
T0 = Fluid Temperature [K]
14×25.4
Ts = Surrounding Temperature [K] 𝜋×[
1000
]×25
𝑎= 85,000 = 0.0005711 (8)
[ ]×2.071×1000
= Joule-Thompson Coefficient [0C/bar] 3600
g = Gas Specific Gravity, MW/28.9625 [-] The hydrate formation temperature [Th] is,
Solving for pipeline temperature profile, 𝑇ℎ [℉] = [14.0835 × 𝑙𝑛(𝑃, 𝑝𝑠𝑖)] − 32.9023 (10)
Where,
𝜋×𝑂𝐷×𝑈
𝑎= 𝑚×𝐶𝑝
Page 2 of 3
Annexure: MS-Excel Spreadsheet
Page 3 of 3