Horizontal Separator Working Principle

There are three common type of

process separator: horizontal
separator, vertical separator, or
spherical separator. The figure
above
is
an
example
of horizontal
two
phase
separator basic diagram.
The first step separation occurs
at the inlet diverter, on the inlet
diverter liquid and vapor will be
separated as the fluid enter
vessel and hits the inlet diverter that will create sudden change in momentum. The liquid droplet
will fall out from the gas stream into the bottom section. Since it will take times to collect the
amount of liquid, this section will provide the retention time.
Retention time is needed to vapor the entrained gas in the liquid. If there are slugs in the liquid,
this retention time provides a surge volume to handle the slugs. The extracted liquid then flows
through an outlet valve which regulated by a level controller.
The gas part will flow over the inlet diverter into the gravity settling section which located above
the liquid. The gas may entrain some liquid; this liquid will be separated out by gravity in
thisgravity settling section and it will fall down to the gas liquid interface.
Before the gas leaves the vessel, it will pass through a coalescing section. The smaller drop
which cant be separated in the gravity settling section will be trapped in the mist extractor. The
mist extractor or coalescing section consists of vane element to remove the small droplet.
The pressure inside the vessel is controlled by a pressure controller. If the pressure too high,
pressure controller will give a signal to open the pressure control valve so the gas can leave
from the vapor space. To maximize the gas liquid interface area, horizontal separator normally
operated at half full.
References:
1. Surface Production Operations, Ken Arnold and Maurice Stewart

CFD Simulation of Three-Phase

Separator: Effects of Size
Distribution
N. Kharoua, L. Khezzar and H. Saadawi
ASME Proceedings | 13th International Symposium on Gas-Liquid Two-Phase Flows

abstract
The gas/oil/water separation in a three-phase horizontal separator, employed by the ADCO
company in Abu Dhabi, was studied previously using the Eulerian-Eulerian with the k-
model assuming mono-dispersed secondary phases (oil and water). The separator was
equipped with new internals due to the increasing amounts of water and Gas-to-Oil Ratio
GOR from the field. The approach allowed the description of several features of the internal
flow but the prediction of the overall efficiency was largely overestimated compared to the
measured value from the field. The source of the discrepancy could be traced back to the
assumption of mono-dispersed secondary phases and possibly to the unknown structure of
the size distribution at the inlet of the separator preventing thus a correct modeling of drag
between the phases and, hence, influencing momentum and secondary phases (oil and
water) dispersion. Investigations, using the Population Balance Model, for size distribution,
were conducted. Normal and Skewed distributions were employed to represent, only, the
secondary water phase due to the limitation of the population model used to only one
secondary phase. The paper presents, in addition to the separation efficiency, the internal
multiphase flow behavior in terms of overall and local phase distributions. The simulations
with PBM model showed a clear improvement of the results in terms of separation efficiency
compared with field tests although no experimental data related to the size distribution were
available.
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