horizontal separator vessel sizing 3

[I2P]

Friends,
I have been recently entrusted with the task of making calculations for horizontal separator vessel sizing, its boot sizing etc.
basically it is a three phase separator meant for separating water, condensate and natural gas.
Since I have lost touch with designing since many years back could ne body guide me as to how to start the calculations which book to refer.what basic data is required to make the said calculations.
Urgent help required.

 

[MortenA]

Basically you should try to locate you company references (or client) first - since many major oil companies have their own standards that are a digest of experience and misc standards.

Assuming that you are referring to process design (and not pressurevessel design) i would like to summarize some parameters:

- Flow rates (gas, condensate, water
- Pressure
- Temperature
- Physical properties (composition and physical properties)

The standards (company or other) will then list some design requirements the most common being):

- Residense time (total and between control points)
- Velocities (in vessel and perhaps also for nozzles etc.)

The residense time for each phase may have to be calculated from various equations that uses the flowrates etc. to ensure that liquid droplets can settle out from the gas phase, that gas bubbles can leave the liquid phases and that water droplets can settle out from the oil phase and vise versa.

Best regards

Morten

 

[Montemayor]

Get a copy of the GPSA Engineering Databook, if you don't already have one. You can obtain an electronic version also. In it, you will find two methods to size a horizontal vapor-liquid separator. A 3-phase separator is something else. The major oil producers don't have their employees design their production separators - unless they want to assume the responsibility on performance, and you'll find they don't. There are companies in the US and Europe that specialize in this specialized engineering application. I would go to one of these companies, rather than design my own (& I've designed small ones and API separators as well). A large part of this design is based on experience, art, and arcane information.

 

[TD2K]

I have a scanned copy of an article on 3 phase separator sizing from Chemical Engineering Progress a few years back that goes through the math. Excellent article IMO, it was co-authored by one of the people who developed the original Hysim program.

If you look around this site, you can find my email address and drop me a line (the site prefers now we don't post this to avoid attracting spammers to the place).

As Art said, this is only part of it. Issues such as foaming, time to separate the oil and water in my main separator, amount of volume to leave for sand if that's an issue, etc are all other factors.