Effect of Angle, Height of Support and Pipe Line Diameter Size on Scour Hole

Abstract

Scouring holes under the oil, gas, and water pipelines threaten their stability by bending and demolishing. This phenomenon can cause damage to the environment and the oil and gas industry. The present study investigated the effect of the pipe diameter, the height of support, and the angle of the pipeline with flow direction by applying the experimental aspects to the cohesive sediments. The experiments were carried out by considering three angles of deviation as zero,15, and 30 degree based on the flow direction. Three opening gaps were considered through the experiments based on the pipe height as 0, D/2, and D/4 from the sand bed. Furthermore, three pipe diameters were employed to investigate the effect of diameter size. The results indicated that by increasing the angle of deviation, the height of scour hole decreased significantly, however, the raising the opening gap between pipe and bed increased the sediment deposition and it causes the height of scour hole is decreased consequently which was constituted approximately 18 percent. Moreover, the pipe diameter affects the scour hole formation and its effect on a downward jet and horseshoe vortexes and the result indicate by increasing the piper diameter the scour hole is increased based on its effect on the flow configuration. Finally, based on the experimental data, an equation was estimated to predict the scour depth by employing the non-linear regression technique.

Keywords

• scour hole
• pipe diameter
• angle of deviation
• submerged pipe line
• cohesive sediment
• fitting equation