Optimización de la eficiencia de tanques de tratamiento de agua de producción mediante simulación CFD.

Abstract

In the oil and gas industry, the content of oil in water (OIW) is a critical factor in controlling hydrocarbon losses and an indicator to avoid blockages in treatment equipment and receiving formations. Today, through Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is possible to evaluate the phase separation process and optimize the equipment design to maximize separation efficiency. In the present study, a CFD multiphase simulation of a skimmer tank has been developed through the academic license of the commercial CFD software ANSYS FLUENT. The conditions inside a skimming tank were replicated and validated with the OIW control carried out by the tank operator company The multiphase phenomenon of the water flow and the oil fraction dragged into the tank was simulated by the eulerian-lagrangian approache through the Discrate Phase Model (DPM) in a transient state. The project was developed with the RANS turbulence model (k- ε) in a three-dimensional domain according to the design and dimensions of the tank. Once the model was validated, new cases were simulated with internal variations: propagators in the inlet flow and collector for the tank discharge, managing to reduce the concentration of crude oil in the discharge from 146,5 ppm to 83,64 ppm and increase the separation efficiency from 70,95% to 81,11%-