CFD Simulation of Droplet Diameter Effect on EPCON Compact Flotation Unit Efficiency

In this study the effect of droplet size on EPCON Compact Flotation Unit (CFU) performance has been investigated numerically with the aim of check the sensitivity of the system to this feature of the flow. Offshore oil and gas production is increasingly growing popular globally. Produced water (PW), which is the largest byproduct of oil and gas production, is a complex mixture of oil pollution droplets and droplet diameter is one of the parameter of the PW. Since the development of offshore petroleum and gas industry, the PW treatment process has been classified into pretreatment, standard-reaching treatment, and advanced purification treatment.EPCON CFU is an excellent pre-treatment technology of PW with high separation efficiency, that combined several processes, including gas flotation and induced centrifugal inertia forces to act on the fluid components of different specific gravities. Accordingly, effect of four different size of droplet diameter on EPCON CFU efficiency have been considered using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) approach. Continuous- Dispersed Fluid model and Re-Normalisation Group (RNG) k–Epsilon have been employed for prediction ofmultiphase flow behavior and simulation of turbulent flow through the cyclone respectively that eventually, simulation results clearly show the high sensitivity of the designed system to the diameter of the separating droplets.

کلیدواژه ها:

Computational Fluid Dynamics ، Compact Flotation Unit ، Turbulent flow ، Two-Phase Flow ، Separation Efficiency