MODELLING THE FLOW OF CRUDE OIL IN PIPELINES

The purpose of this work is to modelize the rheological behaviour of crude oil using threshold stress Bingham and Herschel-Bulkley models. This is allowed us to highlight that the Herschel-Bulkley model represents a better rheological behaviour of the crude oil than the Bingham model. We had also modelized the. rheological behaviour using Cross, Krieger & Dougherty, and Quemada models. The obtained results with these models were validated and we therefore confirmed the non newtonian properties of the crude oil. It is this complex character, due to the solid-fluid interaction which does not allow us to use these traditional models that consider fluids as homogeneous. To bypass this difficulty, we have used the Model of Phan-Thien and Tanner (MPTT) which is based on the description of the fluid microstructure and which seems very plausible to modelize such a flow.