Numerical simulation and experiment on the active hydrocyclone oil-water separation in deepwater

Currently, the offshore petroleum in the world is spreading into sea deeper and deeper. Meanwhile, the exploitations of offshore petroleum and gas in China are mainly focusing on the sea area with water depth no more than 300 meters. Technologies and equipments used to deep-water petroleum and gas exploitation are not enough. This paper proposes an active oil-water hydrocyclone separator with three outlets which have good advantages due to its active controllable rotation of whirling cylinder and continuing separation for the oil-water mixed transitional layer. It is difficult to use equipment to reveal directly the fluid field in the screw-type rotating blade. By using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and the Reynolds Stress Model (RSM), numerical simulation of the internal flow field of the oil-water separator can be revealed, so some relations between efficiency and performance parameter can be gotten easily. Furthermore, we build an experiment system which is designed to test separation performance, although the final experimental results is not so idealized, we find the difference between experimental data and computational result is little. Through this research, it is expected to offer some theoretical basis and design guidance to deep water oil-water separation technology.