Efeito da influência de parâmetros operacionais no processo de separação água/óleo via hidrociclone.

Abstract

Oils, mainly originating from the oil sector, are products that, among its processing and transportation have mixtures of other components in the composition, such as gas, sand and the most common, water. Thus, the oil industry has employed different separation processes, among which has been highlighting the processes using circular motions or swirling, for example, the hydrocyclone. The hydrocyclones are often used in the separation of water / oil by the oil industry due to high processing power, low maintenance, requiring little installation space and the density difference between phases. This research has the objective of evaluate the influence of operating parameters on the separation efficiency water/oil performed by hydrocyclone. The work started developing a structured mesh representative of the study domain, and using the turbulence model RNG κ-E modified simulations were performed using the commercial software Ansys CFX®. With the numerical results generated, it was possible to evaluate and analyze from the perspective of computational fluid dynamics. Results obtained were compared with experimental data reported in the literature and presented a good agreement. The results indicated that the dynamic flow was affected by the concentration of oil in the inlet of the hydrocyclone.