Proposing a Method for Performance Evaluation of a Designed Two-Phase Vertical Separator and a Piston Pump Using Computational Fluid Dynamics

Abstract

Summary Designing and testing effective separators is a time-consuming task that requires sophisticated laboratory equipment or expensive field tests. Computer-aided simulation could be a fast and affordable alternative if the method demonstrates effectiveness and reliability. This work implements a method to simulate a hybrid separator by considering variable outlet boundary conditions caused by a piston pump. This method consists of a novel mesh generation method and a two-phase unsteady-state computational fluid dynamics model that enables full-scale simulations and shows acceptable results that comply with experimental data. Furthermore, the simulation is repeated in several gas/liquid ratios and piston speeds, leading to a correlation to predict the separation efficiency of similar designs. As expected, the results revealed that the pressure drop would increase and separator efficiency would decrease by increasing the piston speed. The influence of the gas/liquid ratio on the pressure drop and separation efficiency was negligible.