Flow Assurance and Safety

Energy applications often involve the need for effective flow-assurance by preventing deposits from blocking the flow path of produced fluids. In this project, combination of physics and data-driven methods will provide predictions on flow regime transitions. This involves coupling of the fluid/mixture chemistry in terms of phase behaviour or equations of state to the CFD codes developed. This, in turn, will produce solutions for the spatio-temporal evolution of the concentration of all species, their velocities, the temperatures and pressure fields throughout the domain. On the other hand, techniques such as multi-fidelity optimisation and model management strategies will be employed along with the construction of surrogate models from high fidelity solution data using a global sensitivity analysis approach.

Particular attention will be paid towards the dynamics of the phase that will deposit on the confining walls due to phase separation, which may lead to blockage and flow disruption. The project will lead to development of a robust, goal-based modelling and simulation framework for predictions and optimisation, with user-defined uncertainty for flow -assurance and safety problems.