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Designing a water-pentane continuos seperator

Designing a water-pentane continuos seperator

Designing a water-pentane continuos seperator

(OP)
Dear all

We are looking to design a tool to seperate water and pentane from each other .

A little background :

Without getting into too many  detailes, there is a pipe with pentane , that got mixed with some water  due to a leak from an outside water pipe.

Now, there is about 10-20% water in the pentane, and we have installed a small seperator ( a little vessel of 50 galons ) that did the job in different places and materials, in the past, but this is kind of a "black box", and no one knows how to adapt it to this situation.

Now, I wish to understand the theory of how this works :

How do I design the vessel so it will have enough retention time to cause continuos seperation in it ? ( while only  using the density differences ) ?

Maybe a cyclon design might fit ?

My hesitations are coming from the fact that all the places I looked talked about designing it according to stoke's law, but this will require very low Re, that I think will be difficult to achieve.

More data : The pentane-water is in around :10-13 bars.
Temp : around 20-30 DegC .
The main pentane pipe is around 24".

Any ideas?

RE: Designing a water-pentane continuos seperator

Hi Mike,

I bumped into your question during my forum search,
and it sounds familiar smile  

I found a nice paper (student thesis) that summaries  Liquid/Liquid cyclone separation (hydrocarbon and Oil in particular).
http://www.nt.ntnu.no/users/skoge/diplom/diplom08/pettersen_tone/Diplom_Tone.pdf

I also found a company that sells small and cheap units to you might want to check.
http://www.enginetech.us/Industrial_Series_Fuel_Separators.html
(not sure about the pressure rating)

Find your HX leak, and say hello to the team.

K.
 

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