Numerical Simulation Of Flow Field And Performance About Nature Gas Wave-plate Separator

To ensure good quality of nature gas for the normal operation of compressors and pipelines,a wave-plate separator is usually used in the natural gas gathering and transportation.The technical specification and economy of natural gas pipe network are largely dependent on the separator's performance.Therefore,the development of high efficient and economical separator has an actual significance.This paper investigates the gas-liquid two phase flow and performance of a separator with wave-plate vanes by using CFD software.Firstly,the flow flied,droplet trajectory and separation performance of vanes,including triangle plate and curve plate,are studied.Also a barb is added on these plates and its influence is studied.Secondly,the effect of the number of channel on the efficiency and pressure drop is discussed for the triangle plate.The channel numbers used are 12,8,6,4 and 3 respectively.It is founded that the 8 channel scheme has the highest comprehensive performance under the same flow rate.Finally,the flow field and efficiency of a whole separator which contains eight-channel wave-plates are numerically simulated by using RNG k-?and DPM as gas phase turbulent model and liquid phase model respectively.The conclusions are as follows:(1)There is a backflow in the corner of a single-channel triangle plate,which reduces the effective flow area and makes droplets trapped more easily.In addition,the barb results in a stronger backflow which makes both the efficiency and pressure drop higher.(2)The six-channel wave-plate scheme has a higher efficiency and lower pressure drop when compared with the single-channel one.With the increasing of channel's number,the efficiency increases continuously while the pressure drop decreases first then increases slowly.The best scheme is the eight-channel wave-plate.(3)For a whole separator containing the eight-channel plates,the gas is almost uniformly distributed.The ratio of gas flow rate in each channel to average value fluctuates around 1.0.And the largest difference is only 7.78% which can be ignored in industrial application.More important is that the efficiency reaches as high as 99.33% which meets the demand of the technical requirements.And droplets bigger than 20?m are totally trapped.