Flow patterns around spaced subsea pipelines

초록

As pipelines are often used to transport gas, oil, water and oil products, numerous pipelines have been installed in offshore field. The pipelines are to be designed and installed to secure the stability to external loads during installation and the operation. In order to investigate the stability of subsea pipelines, it is vital to understand the flow behavior around them. However, flow patterns are generated in a very complex form behind the pipelines that are also dependent on incoming flow velocity, pipelines size, space and etc. To investigate the flow patterns, numbers of experiment are conducted with visualization equipment in a circulating water channel. The flow patterns are recorded from the trajectory of the laser reflected particles. Also the pressure distribution around pipeline is measured.