Medium sized Wax flow loop for live oil LEWAXEVALMS150

Wax deposition inside tubes and pipelines reduces the effective flow area, hence increasing the pressure drop and potentially causing complete blockage. Therefore, developing an understanding of hydrocarbon phase behaviour throughout the pressure and temperature regime, i.e. from the formation to the production facilities, is primordial. The LEWAXEVALMS150 is a realistic medium-sized loop in which live oil is circulated and subjected to a range of heat fluxes and shear rates representative of production flowline conditions.

An experiment mainly consists of four stages, namely, live oil introduction in the loop, thermal pre-treatment, cooling and ungelling. It allows the evaluation of the wax appearance temperature WAT, wax deposition rate, pigging frequency and pipeline restart pressure for gel breaking. The experimental results can also be inputted into a simulation software to generate a thermodynamic model which can be utilized to simulate pipeline petroleum transport.