Development of a heat-balance model for the characterization of wax blockage in flowlines

The presence of a blockage in a pipeline will alter the fluid dynamics of a flowing system in terms of the heat, mass and velocity characteristics. The analysis of the fluid dynamics is based on balances taken on the overall system to qualitatively and quantitatively assess the effects of the blockage. Pioneer work in the area of mass and momentum effects of blockages led to the development of blockage type curves useful in characterizing blockages from limited information. This work is an extension of previous work and is based on the application of a simplistic energy balance approach to characterize blockages in pipelines. The resulting heat models for the case of both a partially and fully-blocked flowline correctly predict the effect of wax deposition. Dimensionless temperature-based blockage maps developed here can be used in modeling unique cases where only two of the three necessary conditions are given. The heat model matches results from commercial software within a limited range of restricted flow conditions.