Experimental Study of a Hydrocyclonic Oil-Water Separator for Downhole Separation
Abstract
This paper presents experimental measurement and analysis of a liquid-liquid hydrocyclone separator to separate oil/water emulsion with 90% water cut. Measurements have been carried out at various temperatures and in-flow rates. Samples were taken before and after the separation and analyzed using InfraCal Oil/Grease Analyzer (HATR-T2). The results showed that, the hydrocyclone separator achieves separation efficiencies higher than 80%, in the flow split region between 0.6 – 0.7 for all the temperature cases considered in the experiments. Within inlet velocities range of 2.5 – 4.5 m/s, the hydrocyclone performance seems to plateau with separation efficiency remaining virtually constant for all the flow and temperature cases. The peak efficiencies for the cases at 25 oC, 30 oC, 40 oC, 50 oC and 60 oC temperatures were averagely around 80.9%, 84.1%, 85.9%, 86.5% and 87.5%, respectively. Fluid temperature slightly impacts the hydrocyclone separation performance. Separation efficiency was observed to increase with decreasing pressure drop ratio (PDR) and by reducing PDR from 0.76 to 0.74 resulted in marginal performance enhancement. Finally, increasing temperature increased the flow turbulence and affect the separation efficiency.
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