THE EFFECT OF TEMPERATURE ON THE SEPARATION EFFICIENCY OF WATER/OIL MIXTURES IN A CYCLONIC SEPARATOR
Morgana de Vasconcellos Araújo1; Flavia Daylane Tavares de Luna1; Antonio Gilson Barbosa de Lima1; Severino Rodrigues de Farias Neto1
1 Universidade Federal de Campina Grande
doi:10.20906/CPS/COB-2015-0410
Resumo
The petroleum, after it be extracted from reservoir, needs to be treated before going to refinery. This occurs because the petroleum do not exists alone. In fact, along the well there is a mixture of hydrocarbon going up, beyond water, sand and other chemicals substances. In oil platforms there are equipments to treat the oil, and this equipments needs to be small because there is not a big space to do this treatment. Between the machinery, this work highlights the cyclonic separator, which is in the final process of the treatment. In this separator, the mixture that feeds is a emulsion and has a bigger volume part of water and a small part of oil. There are some studies about increase the efficiency of separation, like the study of the geometry, of the size, and of the volumetric fraction, for instance. The objective of this work is study numerically the influence of the temperature in the separation of oil and water using a cyclonic separator, which has two inlets and two outlets. All simulations were performed using the commercial package Ansys CFX. Were used the particle model to describe the two-phase flow water/oil and the turbulence model RNG k-e standard.
Palavras-chave: petroleum; cyclonic separator; numerical simulation; temperature