Adiabatic Mixing of Two Hydrocarbons: CFD and Thermodynamics

Hydrocarbons are regularly mixed in gas pipelines to meet certain homogenous conditions for various purposes.  Mixing two components in single-phase (gas or liquid) offers many challenges and lot of researchers have studied and reported many useful findings.  However very little information is available in literature about mixing a gas phase component with a liquid phase component while keeping in mind the VLE behaviors of these two components. Depending on the state (T, P and mole-fraction of component), the gas component may condense when mixed with liquid or the liquid component may vaporize when mixed with gas. Condensation and Vaporization may happen at different sections of the pipe depending on the flow characteristics. In order to understand the entire process a simultaneous calculation of CFD and thermodynamics is required.  This talk will showcase the details of this approach and also present CFD results that will highlight the value of doing such simulations.