Hilly terrain pipeline is a common form of pipeline in oil and gas storage and transportation industry. Due to the hilly terrain influence, the liquid at the elbow of the gathering pipeline is easy to flow back and accumulate to form slug flow, so it is necessary to remove the accumulated liquid by gas purging. In this paper, experiment is carried out in hilly terrain pipelines. Three flow patterns of stratified flow, slug flow and stratified entrained flow are observed. The process of gas purging accumulated liquid is divided into four stages, namely liquid accumulation, liquid rising, continuous outflow and tail outflow. At the same time, the flow pattern maps of each stage are drawn. The pressure drop signal is analyzed in time domain and frequency domain, and the contour map of pressure drop distribution is drawn. It is found that the ratio of range to average value can well distinguish the occurrence range of each flow pattern. Based on visualization, the transition process of slug flow to stratified flow and stratified entrained flow is studied, and the transition boundary prediction model is established. An image processing method is proposed to convert the image signal into a similarity curve, and PSD analysis is performed to calculate the slug frequency. The normal distribution is used to fit the slug frequency, and the predicted correlation is in good agreement with the experimental data.

Large vertical pipes are key structures connecting subsea wells to offshore platforms. However, existing studies mainly focus on small vertical pipes. In a vertical acrylic pipe with 80 mm inner diameter and 11 m height, a high-speed camera was used to visually research the influences of pipe diameters, liquid properties and inlet effect on air-water co-flow characteristic. Different flow regime maps of vertical pipes (diameters are in the range of 50–189 mm) were compared and the critical gas velocity of the transition boundary from bubble to slug flow tended to increase with the increase of diameters at D ≥ 80 mm. Drift-flux models were established in different flow regimes and liquid properties have a significant effect on drift coefficients of bubble flow and slug flow (void fraction α ≤ 0.4). The influence of inlet turbulent effect on the gas-liquid interface distribution gradually weakened and disappeared from the pipe base to 85D, where the flow was fully developed. Slug frequency has a trend of increase first and then decrease with the gas Weber numbers increasing at low liquid superficial velocities (J_L ≤ 0.31 m/s). And on the basis of this law, a new slug frequency correlation was proposed. It was found that there was an exponential relationship between the ratio of lengths of Taylor bubble to slug and the void fraction.