Experimental Research Of Improving The Oil-water Separation Efifciency By Coalescence Technology

At present, most of the oil field has entered into the middle-final phase of petroleumexploitation, and the water cut of crude oil has reached85%~95%, some of which has beento98%. The oily water in the process of oil and water separation, if it was not treated butdirectly discharged, will cause environmental pollution hazards, and to severe degree, it willthreat the security of people's lives, causing economic losses. To deal with oily wastewater,a large number of wastewater treatment tanks have been constructed in the oilfield, whichhas taken up a lot of land and consumed huge amounts of money. Especially, largewastewater treatment tanks can not be built in the offshore oil platforms. Therefore, newand efficient wastewater treatment technologies are urgently to arise to dramaticallyimprove the treatment efficiency and processing standards of the wastewater treatmentwhich can significantly reduce the number and volume of the tanks to achieve energysaving and consumption reduction. Thus, the development of new wastewater treatmenttechnologies that is fit for the true situation of our oilfield and highly efficient and economichas become an important issue of oilfield wastewater treatment stations.The coalescence technology is an oily wastewater treatment technology developed inrecent years. When passes through coalescence components, the fine oil droplets of the oilywastewater will be clustered to from large oil particles; and then with the role of externalforce, oil particles will separate from the surface of the coalescence components, and willovercome the resistance to rapidly float upward with difference of specific gravity betweenoil and water, which will achieve the purpose of improve the oil-water separation. Thecoalescence technology itself will not reduce the oil content, but will change the distributionof the oil particles' size to make the little oil droplets become large, which consequently willincrease the floating rating to dramatically improve the efficiency of the sequent oil removalfacilitiesThis subject, using the method of combining theoretical analysis with field practice,studies the coalescence technology, and analyzes the mechanism of coalescence and how itcan improve the efficiency of oil and water separation. The optimization of coalescencematerials was done to find the coalescence efficiency of quartz sand well; and thencombining coalescence technology with coalescence-uniform flux separator, oil and waterseparation field experiments were done. Results show that the maximum efficiency of oil-water separation of coalescence-uniform flux separator with coalescence technology canreach92.12%, which is better than the one of the single separator and dramatically improvethe oil removal efficiency, and achieve the purpose of energy saving and consumptionreduction.