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A hydrate slurry transport technology based on risk control methods is an important technical means to solve the hydrate blockage of multiphase transport pipelines and to guarantee the safety and efficiency of the exploitation of petroleum resources in deep-water. It is the foundation for the industrial promotion of this technology to adequately understand hydrate slurry flow characteristics, especially the influence of hydrate microbehavior on particle size and its distribution. This research establishes a kinetic model of hydrate aggregation (KMHA) that is developed to reflect the complex physical processes (growth, aggregation, and breakage) of hydrate particles based on the population balance theory by analyzing the microbehavioral mechanism of particles in oil–water–hydrate flow systems. Then, a three-dimensional hydraulic–thermal–chemical coupling model is established by coupling the KMHA with a multiphase flow model to investigate the flow characteristics and heat-transfer characteristics of the oil–water–hydrate slurry. This coupling model is the first to analyze the effect of temperature field on the evolution of hydrate and particle flow characteristics and is able to accurately predict the characteristics of growth, aggregation, and deposition of particles in oil–water–hydrate flow systems. Meanwhile, this model is employed to analyze the hydrate slurry flow in the horizontal pipe.
Liu et al. (Mon,) studied this question.