DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF GAS-LIQUID CYLINDRICAL CYCLONE COMPACT SEPARATORS FOR THREE-PHASE FLOW

This report presents a brief overview of the activities and tasks accomplished during the first half year (October 1, 2001--March 31, 2002) of the fifth project year budget period (October 1, 2001--September 30, 2002). An executive summary is presented initially followed by the tasks of the current budget period. Then, detailed description of the experimental and modeling investigations are presented. Subsequently, the technical and scientific results of the activities of this project period are presented with some discussions. The findings of this investigation are summarized in the ''Conclusions'' section followed by relevant references. The fifth project year activities are divided into three main parts, which are carried out in parallel. The first part is continuation of the experimental program that includes a study of the oil/water two-phase behavior at high pressures and control system development for the two-phase LLCC{copyright}. This investigation has been extended for three-phase GLCC as well. The second part consists of the development of a simplified mechanistic model incorporating the experimental results and behavior of dispersion of oil in water and water in oil. This will provide an insight into the hydrodynamic flow behavior and serve as the design tool for the industry. Although useful for sizing GLCC{copyright} for proven applications, the mechanistic model will not provide detailed hydrodynamic flow behavior information needed to screen new geometric variations or to study the effect of fluid property variations. Hence it will be validated with a more rigorous approach of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation. Multidimensional multiphase flow simulation at high pressures and for real crude conditions will provide much greater depth into the understanding of the physical phenomena and the mathematical analysis of three-phase GLCC{copyright} design and performance. In the third part, design guidelines for three-phase GLCC{copyright} field applications by the industry will be developed. These design guidelines will form the basis for high-pressure real crude conditions