Norwegian Infrastructure for Multiphase Flows

Multiphase flows involve the complex motion of mutually interacting fluids. Fundamentally, such flows are commonplace in Nature and play a crucial role in many industrial applications, e.g., in petroleum and CCS transport pipelines. From a scientific perspective, the behavior of multiphase flows is highly challenging and the best prediction tools available today involve a combination of carefully tailored models and empirical correlations derived from experiments. The latter is exactly where the Norwegian Infrastructure for Multiphase Flows plays a key role, both nationally and internationally. SINTEF and IFE possess internationally unique laboratory facilities for multiphase flow research which have been essential to the oil and gas industry and its value creation. This project aims to secure that the infrastructure facilities remain state-of-the-art, fully operational, and delivering high quality research secure access to and use of the largest multiphase flow dataset in the world. The process equipment and scientific instruments in the flow labs continuously require maintenance, upgrades, and expansion. Securing this demand will help the infrastructure reach new achievements. This project will establish an extensive database to support research areas like predictive analytics and regulatory techniques. Improving access to the state-of-the-art datasets will facilitate their long-term relevance and meet the O&G industry’s strategic goals of production optimization and digitalization. The flow infrastructure will be highly relevant in relation to CO2 transport and storage; and for the O&G industry where especially gas production will play a key role in the European energy mix on the path to a low carbon energy system. In summary, the IMF2022 project will ensure that IFE’s and SINTEF’s flow lab facilities keep their position as a world-class provider of pipe flow measurements.

SINTEF and IFE have unique laboratory facilities for multiphase flow research at an international level. The laboratories perform experiments for both industrial and academic partners and are among the best in the world in their focus areas, with a capacity for multiple different measurement methods. To ensure that the laboratories can continue to deliver up-to-date experimental data to national and international research environments, the partners apply together for infrastructure funding for upgrade, maintenance, operation and expansion of existing process equipment and instrumentation. The application also includes funding to establish an extensive searchable database for large amounts of multiphase data which have been collected over decades. Providing access to the world's largest multiphase flow datasets will enable new fields of development for production optimization via digitalization and improved multiphase flow modelling. This application is based on the project outline IMF-2020.