Critical liquid carrying flow rate model with consideration of interfacial tension and droplet deformation effect

At present, the interfacial tension and drag coefficient are usually considered as the constants by the critical liquid carrying flow rate model, and the effect of temperature and pressure on the interfacial tension and the influence of droplet size and deformation on drag coefficient both are neglected.Thus, the prediction of critical liquid carrying flow rate has great difference from the actual results.In order to predict the critical liquid carrying flow rate of the gas wells more accurately, first, the interfacial tension formula was established by segmental fitting the experimental data of the interfacial tension; then, the critical liquid carrying flow model with consideration of the effect of the interfacial tension and droplet deformation was obtained by introducing the deformable droplet drag coefficient formula and the relationship formula between the droplet deformation degree and the droplet size.The research results show that the higher the temperature and the pressure are, the smaller the interfacial tension and critical liquid carrying flow rate are.Besides, the bigger the droplet size is and the more serious the droplet deformation is, the smaller the height-width ratio is, the bigger the drag coefficient is and the smaller the critical liquid carrying flow rate is.The experimental results indicate that the model can agree well with the experimental data of microscopic droplet effusions of the gas wells.Moreover, the new model can predict the critical liquid carrying flow rate with different droplet sizes more accurately and be more suitable to the development rules of the gas fields.