Process Modeling Of Oil Leak Control By Negative Pressure Pump In An Off-shore Pipeline

Pipeline transportation, as one of the major modes for carrying oil and gas products, has been rapidly developing since the last middle century. However, with more and more off-shore oil-pipeline leak accidents occurring, safety of pipeline transportation has attracted more and more attentions of publics and stakeholders since leaked oil resulted in huge disasters to marine ecosystem and environment.Previous approaches relevant to oil pipeline leak were concentrated on developing more efficient oil-pipeline leak monitor and leak location orientation techniques and leaked oil reclaiming measures. The monitor and detection techniques can only help quickly find the accident such that corresponding emergent measures can be undertaken as early as possible. The reclaiming measures can only reduce impacts of oil leak on marine ecosystem and environment. However, oil in the pipeline will continue to leak into the sea even though oil-pipeline operation is shut down after leak is detected. Moreover, difficulty and cost for reclaiming leaked oil and restoring contaminated marine ecosystem and environment will be also significantly increased.In this study, a framework was proposed that negative pressure oil pumps are installed at the upstream and downstream of off-shore oil-pipeline respectively to prevent further oil leak after a leak accident is detected. The physical and numerical models were developed for the off-shore crude-oil pipeline which is located at the Hangzhou Bay.With the Reynolds number similarity criterion, the physical model was developed. Experiments were undertaken to study characteristics of crude oil leak under various pipeline system and negative pressure pump operation conditions. The developed numerical model was developed to simulate oil flow movement in the pipeline after the negative pressure pump was started to control oil leak. The results of both physical and numerical models indicated that the proposed method is efficient and applicable for controlling further oil leak. Type and work parameters of negative pressure oil pump were suggested to the stakeholders for field project design. Future approaches are suggested to tackle impacts of factors on oil leak control efficiency of negative pressure oil pump method, such as diameter size and material of oil pipeline, and crude oil characteristics.