Prediction of pipeline restart using different rheological models of gelled crude oil

Abstract Shutdown of a waxy crude oil pipeline is unavoidable due to maintenance or emergency. It is critical to select the rheological models of gelled crude oil when investigating the pipeline restart process. Three crude oil rheological models are summarized based on previous researches in this paper, which are the viscoelastic model of a viscous type (Model 1), viscoelastic model of an elastic type (Model 2), and pure viscous thixotropic model without yield stress (Model 3). The same rheological data was fitted by the three models respectively. The critical state that pipeline can restart successfully is dominated by the slow creep of the gelled crude oil that can be regarded as an incompressible pipe flow, and this is verified by the pipe restart experiments under constant pressure conditions in this paper. To discuss the effects of the rheological models on calculation of pipeline restart separately, a simplified one-dimensional mathematical model with the pump boundary condition is established. The different calculated flow rate indicates that rheological models affect the judgement of the pipeline restart even though they are fitted from the same rheological data.