Horizontal Settling Three-phase Separator Design And Numerical Study

Three-phases separator is one of the most important equipments in the oilfield ground engineering, always the first equipment to deal with well fluid in production platform, which is the key of economic and stable oil and gas production. Separation efficiency improvement of three-phases separator is the emphasis of research, and the inner compenents affect the separation efficiency greatly. This study designed the basis dimension of three-phases separators by Half-Full method, then simulated the separators by FLUENT software and got the inner fluid situation of the separator which was composed of three different practical inlets——sloping baffle type inlets, down hole box type inlets and blade type inlets, two kinds of rectifier components——window type and tubular type, as well as folded plate type coalescence structure. The main results are as follows:(1) Using the Half-Full method to design the horizontal settling separator. The intiatory size of Half-Full horizontal separator could be calculated by the oil-water settling separation principle, residence time of liquid phase and gas capacity constrains, which provided the size data for simulation. Checking the design size by two-dimensional numerical simulation of three-phases separator, and proved that the design was reasonable and of reference significance.(2) Running three-dimensional numerical simulation of the three-phases separator by FLUENT, and found that the blade type inlet is the best of the three inlet components in avoiding feeding turbulence; down hole box type inlet is the best one in separation of oil and gas.(3) Window type rectifier components wss better than tubular type one in rectification. The rectification could be improved by increasing the length of tubular type rectifier.(4) The coalescence effect could reach best when the break angle was45°and the distance between plates was1Omm.(5) Receiving the flow field distribution of three-phases separator with porous medium by simulation, the results showed that the separation efficiency could be improved and the separation time could be reduced by adding recfifier components or coalescence components.In this paper, the results have certain reference to practical application.