Estimated Overall Heat Transfer Coefficient for Natural Gas Transport from Urucu - Coari - Manaus Network by Pipeline Studio Software

Temperature is one of the main effects on design, installation, and operation in the natural gas flow pipelines. For example, it is used to calculate the installation position of in-line heaters to prevent equipment freezes. The prediction of an acceptable temperature profile requires a series of complex and iterative calculations which the available data in most of the cases is insufficient. In order to develop a temperature profile correlation of the gas pipelines in Amazonas was performed the calculation of the overall heat transfer coefficient by thermohydraulic simulations from real values. In this study, pressure, flow, and temperature data were collected from the natural gas field and were inserted into Pipeline Studio ® Software. The best overall heat transfer coefficients performance in relation to real temperature profile were 2.0 W/m2K, 1.7 W/m2K, and 1 W/m2K. These results were used because the graph of the temperature profile has behaved in a way more compatible with the graph of the real temperature profile. Therefore, a comparison of real data with simulation results shows good agreement and the best value to be used on thermohydraulic simulation for transport pipelines in Amazonas is 1.0 W/m2K.