Numerical Investigation of Two-Phase Flow in Natural Gas Ejector

Abstract

Increasing production and recovery from the mature oil and gas fields often requires a boosting system when the gas pressure is lower than that demanded by the transportation or process system. The supersonic ejector, considered to be a cost-effective way to boost the production of a low-pressure gas well, was introduced into the industrial field. However, the exploitation of natural gas often accompanies with water. The computational fluid dynamics (CFD) technique was employed to investigate the two-phase effect (water droplets) on the performance of natural gas ejector for the motive pressure ranging from 11.0 MPa to 13.0 MPa, induced pressure from 3.0 MPa to 5.0 MPa, and backpressure from 5.1 MPa to 5.6 MPa, while the injected water flow rate was less than 0.03 kg s⁻¹. The numerical results show that the entrainment ratio of the two-phase operation was higher than that of the single-phase operation with the variation of backpressure. Meanwhile, the entrainment ratio increased with the increase of injected water flow rate into the primary flow. When the water was injected into the secondary flow, the entrainment ratio decreased as the injected water flow rate increased, but the critical backpressure remained unchanged.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51125027 and 51006081) and National Basic Research program of China (973 Program) (2009CB219803).