Removal of moisture from contaminated transformer oil in rectangular separators

Abstract

This paper deals with the removal of moisture from the contaminated transformer oil. Design of a rectangular separator and the results of water-oil emulsion separation are shown in this paper. The influence of different values of the separator height and the distance between the rows of elements on the emulsion separation efficiency was studied. In order to calculate the process of removing the moisture from transformer insulating oil, the multiphase Eulerian-Eulerian model “Volume of Fluid” with the number of phases equal to 2 was applied in ANSYS Fluent software package. K–ε turbulence model was used for the calculations. The results were obtained while solving the nonstationary issue. In the course of numerical simulation, the object of study was the transformer oil T-1500U, containing some water amount. The results of numerical simulation of water-oil emulsion separation in a rectangular separator are shown. In the course of numerical studies, it was found that the use of a rectangular separator in order to remove the moisture from transformer oil allows it to be purified from water by 99.99%, providing that the geometrical dimensions of device are chosen correctly. The use of developed rectangular separator can be an alternative to the use of decanting tanks, various separators and other purification devices, which have extremely low rate of purification of contaminated spent oils. This separator allows purifying the transformer oil from water with a speed of 1-2 m/s while the efficiency is equal to 99.99%.