Designing a water-pentane continuos seperator

[Mike4chemic]

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?

 

[StewPad]

Hi Mike,

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

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.