Effect of Hydrocyclone Inlet Device (HID) in Three Phase Gravity Separator for Oil-Water Separation Improvement

As the oil production field reaches its mature phase and the surface processing facilities reaches its maximum capacity, more water is produced together with the reservoir fluid. The management and control of water production have become a vital activity in order to enhance the quality of crude oil processing in meeting customer satisfaction. The option that is currently adopted in the oil and gas industry is the introduction of Hydrocyclone Inlet Device (HID) in a gravity separator. This new design takes advantage of both the centrifugal force of HID and gravity torce of a gravity separator. The main advantage of this HID is the reduction in foaming of the inlet flow of the gravity separator. isy applying Hiü at One inlet or gravity separator, the rejuvenation of new separator vessel is not required since it is more economical to replace the current inlet with cyclone inlet. The HID helps to increase separation capacity without additional vessel and major modification to the existing facilities. However, for the application of HID in high water cut from oil production field, the mixture of oil and water is of difficult oil-water emulsion pattern. This complex emulsion pattern is caused by the changes in oil-water composition and also different sizes of oil droplets due to the choke variations. The retention time taken by the droplets to coalescence during gravity settling process is affected and this causes the reduction in the efficiency of separator in oil-water separation. Apart from that, this oil and water mixture exhibits different properties at certain operating parameters such as at high temperature, flowrate and oil-water proportion. Therefore, the interest of this project is to investigate the effect of HID in gravity separator at certain parameters. An experimental approach for oil and water separation with constructed prototype using waste crude oil at different operating temperature, flowrate and oil-water proportion is performed in this project to improve the oil-water separation. Results obtained from the experiment shows that the HID performs better at high operating temperature and high incoming fluid flowrate. However, at high water cut, the performance of HID is lesser compared to typical plate diverter, since the swirling action exerted by HID causes more complex reverse water-in-oil emulsion