A Guide To Gasketing Principles And Best Practices

TutorialLeakage from static joints has been found to be a major contributor of emissions in many plants. With the collaboration from the world’s leading gasket manufacturers, the Gasket Division of the Fluid Sealing Association has created a training presentation that will assist all personnel dealing with modern gasketing applications and issues. What may appear to be a simple and easy to install component actually requires knowledge and understanding of its working principles and characteristics. This paper will start with basic gasketing concepts and then proceed into details regarding installation & assembly. It will also address equipment and fastener considerations, material selection and common uses. Finally, field failure analysis techniques will be explained so that errors in selection or installation procedures can be corrected. As the original format of this paper is based on a digital slide presentation, the format that follows will follow that layout

Development of Next Generation Multiphase Pipe Flow Prediction Tools

The developments of fields in deep waters (5000 ft and more) is a common occurrence. It is inevitable that production systems will operate under multiphase flow conditions (simultaneous flow of gas-oil-and water possibly along with sand, hydrates, and waxes). Multiphase flow prediction tools are essential for every phase of the hydrocarbon recovery from design to operation. The recovery from deep-waters poses special challenges and requires accurate multiphase flow predictive tools for several applications including the design and diagnostics of the production systems, separation of phases in horizontal wells, and multiphase separation (topside, seabed or bottom-hole). It is very crucial to any multiphase separation technique that is employed either at topside, seabed or bottom-hole to know inlet conditions such as the flow rates, flow patterns, and volume fractions of gas, oil and water coming into the separation devices. The overall objective was to develop a unified model for gas-oil-water three-phase flow in wells, flow lines, and pipelines to predict the flow characteristics such as flow patterns, phase distributions, and pressure gradient encountered during petroleum production at different flow conditions (pipe diameter and inclination, fluid properties and flow rates). The project was conducted in two periods. In Period 1 (four years), gas-oil-water flow in pipes were investigated to understand the fundamental physical mechanisms describing the interaction between the gas-oil-water phases under flowing conditions, and a unified model was developed utilizing a novel modeling approach. A gas-oil-water pipe flow database including field and laboratory data was formed in Period 2 (one year). The database was utilized in model performance demonstration. Period 1 primarily consisted of the development of a unified model and software to predict the gas-oil-water flow, and experimental studies of the gas-oil-water project, including flow behavior description and closure relation development for different flow conditions. Modeling studies were performed in two parts, Technology Assessment and Model Development and Enhancement. The results of the Technology assessment study indicated that the performance of the current state of the art two-phase flow models was poor especially for three-phase pipeline flow when compared with the existing data. As part of the model development and enhancement study, a new unified model for gas-oil-water three-phase pipe flow was developed. The new model is based on the dynamics of slug flow, which shares transition boundaries with all the other flow patterns. The equations of slug flow are used not only to calculate the slug characteristics, but also to predict transitions from slug flow to other flow patterns. An experimental program including three-phase gas-oil-water horizontal flow and two-phase horizontal and inclined oil-water flow testing was conducted utilizing a Tulsa University Fluid Flow Projects Three-phase Flow Facility. The experimental results were incorporated into the unified model as they became available, and model results were used to better focus and tailor the experimental study. Finally, during the Period 2, a new three-phase databank has been developed using the data generated during this project and additional data available in the literature. The unified model to predict the gas-oil-water three phase flow characteristics was tested by comparing the prediction results with the data. The results showed good agreements

Interesting magnetic properties of Fe1−x_{1-x}Cox_xSi alloys

Solid solution between nonmagnetic narrow gap semiconductor FeSi and diamagnetic semi-metal CoSi gives rise to interesting metallic alloys with long-range helical magnetic ordering, for a wide range of intermediate concentration. We report various interesting magnetic properties of these alloys, including low temperature re-entrant spin-glass like behaviour and a novel inverted magnetic hysteresis loop. Role of Dzyaloshinski-Moriya interaction in the magnetic response of these non-centrosymmetric alloys is discussed.Comment: 11 pages and 3 figure

Sharp interface limits of phase-field models

The use of continuum phase-field models to describe the motion of well-defined interfaces is discussed for a class of phenomena, that includes order/disorder transitions, spinodal decomposition and Ostwald ripening, dendritic growth, and the solidification of eutectic alloys. The projection operator method is used to extract the ``sharp interface limit'' from phase field models which have interfaces that are diffuse on a length scale $\xi$. In particular,phase-field equations are mapped onto sharp interface equations in the limits $\xi \kappa \ll 1$ and $\xi v/D \ll 1$, where $\kappa$ and $v$ are respectively the interface curvature and velocity and $D$ is the diffusion constant in the bulk. The calculations provide one general set of sharp interface equations that incorporate the Gibbs-Thomson condition, the Allen-Cahn equation and the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang equation.Comment: 17 pages, 9 figure

An object-oriented approach to hybrid structured/unstructured grid generation

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/77270/1/AIAA-1996-32-959.pd

Permeability Estimates of Self-Affine Fracture Faults Based on Generalization of the Bottle Neck Concept

We propose a method for calculating the effective permeability of two-dimensional self-affine permeability fields based on generalizing the one-dimensional concept of a bottleneck. We test the method on fracture faults where the local permeability field is given by the cube of the aperture field. The method remains accurate even when there is substantial mechanical overlap between the two fracture surfaces. The computational efficiency of the method is comparable to calculating a simple average and is more than two orders of magnitude faster than solving the Reynolds equations using a finite-difference scheme

Fluid Flow Property Estimation from Seismic Scattering Data

We present a methodology for relating seismic scattering signals from fractures to the fluid permeability field of the fracture network. The workflow is used to interpret seismic scattering signals for the reservoir permeability of the Emilio Field in the Adriatic Sea.Eni-MIT Energy Initiative Founding Member Progra

Numerical Study of Hydrodynamic Process in Chaohu Lake

In this paper, the hydrodynamic characteristics of water flow in Chaohu Lake are studied by using the finite volume coastal ocean model (FVCOM), which is verified by the observed data. The typical flow field and the 3-D flow structure are obtained for the lake. The flow fields under extreme conditions are analyzed to provide a prospective knowledge of the water exchange and the transport process.The influence of the wind on the flow is determined by the cross spectrum method. The results show that the wind-driven flow dominates most area of the lake. Under prevailing winds in summer and winter, the water flows towards the downwind side at the upper layer while towards the upwind side at the lower layer in most area except that around the Chaohu Sluice. The extreme wind speed is not favorable for the water exchange while the sluice's releasing water accelerates the process. The water velocity in the lake is closely related with the wind speed

Baseline-free damage identification of metallic sandwich panels with truss core based on vibration characteristics

A baseline-free damage identification method is proposed to identify damages in metallic sandwich panels with truss core in the article. The method is based on flexibility matrix and gapped smoothing method, with damage index defined DIm. The weight coefficient m is introduced to consider the effect of damages on both low-order modes and high-order modes. Numerical simulations and experiments are conducted to evaluate the present method. Besides, damage index DIm* is also defined by processing DIm with Teager energy operator, and comparisons between DIm and DIm* are also carried out. Results show that the proposed method is effective in detecting single damage and multiple damages of the same or different extent. The weight coefficient m plays a very important role in identification of multiple damages of different styles. When comparing with DIm*, it is found that the present index DIm is better at suppressing the singularity caused by contact nodes and detecting of multiple damages which contain small or slight damages.</p