RESEARCH ARTICLE
Depressurization System by Coiled Pipes Applied to a High Pressure Process: Experimental Results and Modeling
J. M. Benjumea*, J. Sánchez-Oneto, J. R. Portela, E. J. Martínez de la Ossa
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2017Volume: 11
First Page: 17
Last Page: 32
Publisher ID: TOCENGJ-11-17
DOI: 10.2174/1874123101711010017
Article History:
Received Date: 10/02/2017Revision Received Date: 24/05/2017
Acceptance Date: 02/06/2017
Electronic publication date: 28/07/2017
Collection year: 2017

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Background:
The use of backpressure regulator valves is widespread in high-pressure processes both at laboratory and pilot plant scales, but being a single step for effluent depressurization, such valves may have some limitations at industrial scale. In an effort to improve the depressurization step, this work studies a system based on the pressure drop of a fluid that circulates through coiled pipes.
Method:
The equipment, based on three series of variable length coiled pipes, was installed to achieve depressurization of 240 bars in a SCWO pilot plant.
Results:
The experimental results were compared with those obtained by the modeling carried out using different friction factor correlations from the literature.
Conclusion:
Among all the correlations tested, the Lockhart–Martinelli correlation showed the best agreement with experimental data. However, it was necessary to obtain an appropriate C parameter to achieve a good agreement with experimental data.