CFD Simulation of Parameters Affecting on Oil/Water Separation Process Inside a Horizontal Separator Using Eulerian Model

Oil/water separation plays a vital role in many technological and environmental engineering processes such as petrochemical, culinary, chemical, and pharmaceutical industries. Therefore, ANSYS Fluent software was used to simulate a 3D steady-state model for water/oil separation process in a horizontal cylindrical separator. The effect of changing both volume fractions, droplet diameters of oil, and mixture velocity on separation process was investigated in this work. Where the volume fraction percentages are from 20% to 50% with 10% interval value, and the mixture velocity was changed to 0.1 m/s, 0.5 m/s and 1 m/s. While the values of oil droplet diameter are 0.25 mm, 0.5 mm, 0.75 mm, 1 mm. The simulation is based on solving both the continuity, momentum, and RNG k-ϵ turbulence equations with Eulerian model. The results showed that with high volume fraction of oil lead to appear amount of oil didn't exit after the weir, consequently the separation efficiency of oil reduced. Therefore, the best separation process was with 20% of oil volume fraction. Further, the simulation findings demonstrated that the separation process in horizontal separators improved with growing up droplet diameter and velocity of oil. However, it is important to strike a balance between both oil droplet size and mixture velocity with other design and operational parameters to optimize the water/oil separation efficiency. In conclusion, CFD simulation studies help to understand the behaviour of horizontal separators devices and identify the optimal operation parameters with design parameters of these separators through performing of more attempts.