I have had the fortune to devote some of my time to understand the nuances of fluid flow and hydraulics, including single-phase and multi-phase flow and developing my own engineering calculations related to pipeline process design. To a major extent, this scenario exists due to the fact that there are too few pipeline projects being executed in India The big ones prefer to do their pipeline design and flow assurance in the Middle-East, Europe and North America. You will not even find the aforementioned software in a majority of the engineering consulting companies in India, even the big ones. Piping engineers are plentiful but finding a Pipeline Design and Pipeline construction engineer is like searching a needle in a hay stack. In India, pipeline design and flow assurance is still in it's infancy with it being the preserve of an exclusive few. As an example I remember that a firewater network to be designed as per NFPA guidelines used the software default fluid flow package of "Beggs and Brill" for pressure drop instead of the required "Hazen-Williams" correlation, since the engineer was using the software for data entry.
A design software is as only as good as the design engineer handling it and the adage of "Garbage In-Garbage Out" will remain always true for any software. I have always shunned the short-cut and lazy approach in my work.
While it is clear that the sophistication of flow assurance studies makes it inevitable to use software with advanced algorithms and iterative capabilities due to the severe limitations of doing manual calculations related to multi-phase flow, the surprising aspect was most process engineers using the software as "Data Entry Operators" without bothering to understand the basic principles of hydraulics and fluid flow. However even there, it was evident that the flow assurance studies undertaken were entirely dependent on sophisticated pipeline design and flow assurance software such as PIPESIM, PIPEPHASE, OLGA, PIPELINE STUDIO (TLNET / TGNET). Well it is stating the very obvious, since oil and gas is the economic driver of middle-east nations. I worked in the middle-east for quite a few years and during those years found out that pipeline design including flow assurance of long-distance crude oil and natural gas pipelines is an essential process design activity performed by process engineers.
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