Optimum design of inline gas-liquid cyclone separator for wide range of inlet gas volume fractions

Abstract

The inline gas-liquid cyclone separator has been gradually used in oil & gas industry due to its high separation efficiency and less footprint. However, under the inlet flow conditions with large range of gas volume fractions, the research on structure design and separation performance are seriously insufficient. The preliminary structural design of the inline gas-liquid separator was carried out according to the particle separation theory, and the key structural parameters were optimized by using the Response Surface Method (RSM) together with Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). The structure optimization has improved the degassing efficiency by 17.44% and dehydration efficiency by 7.59%. With air and water as working medium, the separation performance of the inline gas-liquid cyclone separator was experimentally investigated in laboratory under a large range of gas volume fractions. The results show that the separation efficiency for both degassing and dehydration can exceed 80% with the inlet gas volume fraction ranges from 0.2 to 0.8. The optimum normalized flow split and liquid volume flow rate are 0.9 –1.2 and 8 m³/h, respectively.