Spiral pipe geometry for particle mud Slurry in Semau Island, Indonesia

Oil and gas exploration in Semau, one of some islands in East Nusa Tenggara of Indonesia has caused by eruption of gas and mud. This incident is considered a disaster because it harms the people around who lost their property and fields. The mud slurry characteristics by passive control method of highly concentrated mud eruption containing solid particles have been investigated. Actually, when the particles that flowed not sufficiently high, it caused by low velocity of mud slurry. This natural phenomenon can illustrate the reality of how the behaviour of the phenomenon of sludge flow deposition occurs. Spiral pipe with twist grooves are constant on the axis pipe and slurry that also rotates when it is flowed. By the behaviour of the swirl flow, particles are allowed to flow at low speeds. The purpose of this study is to examine the characteristic flow of mud slurry that is flowed in the three lobe spiral pipe. The shear rate and shear stress are obtained by measuring the pressure drop and the volumetric flow rate in circular pipe. By the experiment, the power law exponent in this study ranged from 0.72 to 1 for liquid and solid particles of 20%, 30%, and 45% by weight of concentration. The particle diameter of the test in this study is 1-5 μm and density is 2.7 x 10 ³ (kg/m3). The degree of homogeneous distributed suspension of liquid and solid particles for horizontal axis of the pipe were compared with circular pipe and spiral pipe in laminar and turbulent flow. Through this research, P/Di = 7 spiral pipes proved to reduce friction resistance higher than circular pipe. The higher drag reduction happened for 25.58 % with the generalize Reynolds number 5 x 10 ³ . The value obtained shows that the spiral pipe impacts the drag reduction to the mud slurry.