Numerical Simulation of Internal Flow in Jumper Tube with Blind Tee

Jumper tubes are widely used in the field of ocean engineering as a key component of oil and gas transportations. In order to improve the mixing conditions in the offshore pipelines, a blind tee is usually installed upstream of the measuring instrument to replace the elbow connections. The purpose of this research is to study the influence of the blind tees on the internal mixing conditions of the jumper tube. To this end, the three-dimensional flow fields inside the jumper tubes are solved with the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) method, and the internal flow characteristics of the jumper tubes with blind tees installed at different positions are analyzed. The absolute axial vorticity is used to characterize the mixing conditions of the fluid in the jumper, and the vorticities at fifty-nine sections inside the jumper tube are extracted and compared under different configurations. The results show that compared to the traditional jumpers, the cross-sectional vorticity at the position where a blind tee is installed increases by range between 22% and 136%, and the corresponding dissipation speed decreases as well. It also reveals that the effect of installing blind tees at all elbow positions is not as good as that of using a single blind tee to increase the vorticity at some specific positions, especially for the outlet of the jumper tube.