Numerical Simulation Of Natural Gas Swirling Gas-Liquid Separator

Natural Gas without dehydration treatment will easily produce gas hydrate when transported through pipeline, especially in winter with lower temperature. The formation of gas hydrate will plug the gas line and cause large economic losses. In order to prevent such a situation, a highly efficient and swirling gas-liquid separator with simple structure is developed.In this paper, a swirling gas-liquid separator is designed and manufactured, and gas turbulent flow field is simulated by using RSM model, basing on control-volume method and applying SIMPLE arithmetic. Distributing characteristic of velocity, pressure in internal gas turbulent flow field were gained by numerical computation.The article deals with water phase flow by adopting algebra slip model, distribution law and characteristic of gas and water phases flow were obtained by computing. From water phase thickness distributing chart of vertical section, it can be seen that the mainly parts of water separation is rotation flow pipe. The conclusion is consistent with the design of theory analyse.In order to optimize design of gas-liquid separator, different structural parameters and operating parameters on separation efficiency was simulated with commercial software FLUENT after some appropriate hypothesis in the Lagrange-coordinate. The most optimized structure size was obtained.According to the results of numerical simulation, a set of laboratory testing system used to measure separation efficiency of gas-liquid separator is constructed, and the testing data is accpted. A comparison among the laboratory testing, the numerical results and calculated results reveals that the relative error is within 4%. The two results prove the correctness of mathematical model and computing method. The purpose of this paper is simulating interal flow field and condition of different parameters of self-designed swirling gas-liquid separator.Compare with the simulating results and laboratory test,we have designed the optimize size of self-designed swirling gas-liquid separator,in order to provide a theoretical basis of field application in furture.