Effects of Reservoir Parameters on Separation Behaviors of the Spiral Separator for Purifying Natural Gas Hydrate

Abstract

The spiral separator is an important tool for desanding in natural gas hydrate production, and the change of hydrate reservoir parameters has a great impact on spiral separator behavior. Mastering the influence law is helpful to improve the separation performance. Until now, there was still no detailed analysis of the effect mechanism between reservoir parameters and spiral separator behavior. In this paper, a downhole spiral separator was designed. Then, the effects of reservoir parameters (particle size, hydrate, volume fraction, and sand volume fraction) on separation performance (discrete phase distribution, separation efficiency, and differential pressure) with different flow rates were investigated by numerical simulation method Fluent 18.0. The results show that effects degree of reservoir parameters is in order from large to small: sand phase volume fraction, particle size, hydrate volume fraction. As the particle size increases, the separation performance is improved. When the sand volume fraction increases, the natural gas hydrate (NGH) recovery efficiency and differential pressure both increase, but the sand removal efficiency decreases. When the hydrate fraction increases, the separation performance change law is opposite to that when the sand volume fraction increases. In addition, with increasing the flow rate, the efficiency and differential pressure increase. Therefore, reservoir saturation and porosity can balance NGH recovery efficiency and sand removal efficiency. Furthermore, the spiral separator has good performance under the change of reservoir parameters. The performance of the NGH spiral separator can be also maintained by increasing the flow rate.