Numerical Investigation of Oil Gas Separation with the Use of VOF CFD

Abstract

In this research paper, a numerical study regarding gas-oil separation is presented. Employing the geometry of a classic separator used by the NRDI for Gas Turbines COMOTI and a Computer-Aided Design (CAD) software, the computational domain was defined. To perform the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) investigation, the mesh was created with the ANSYS Meshing tool, and the ANSYS CFX was employed as a solver. The computational domain was split into 5 subdomains, 3 were fluid and 2 were defined as porous media. The volume porosity, loss model, and permeability were set up. In terms of turbulence flow, the standard k–ε model was adopted. The results of the numerical calculations in terms of oil volume fraction and streamline profiles were used to analyze the separator configuration. The results show that the numerical investigation with the VOF (Volume of Fluid Method) - CFD model is capable of analyzing the performance of a two-phase separator equipped with two demisters-porous media.