A novel horizontal gas–liquid pipe separator for wet gas based on the phase-isolation

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel horizontal gas–liquid pipe separator with a compact structure based on the phase-isolation. In the separator, the gas–liquid two-phase flow is firstly isolated as a swirling annular flow by a swirler, where gas core and liquid film spiral and flow forward in parallel. Based on the flow characteristics of the swirling liquid film, a downward tangential liquid extraction channel is designed, which is tangent to the swirl trajectory of the liquid film. Then the swirling liquid film can be directly separated by falling into the downward tangential channel under the combined action of its kinetic energy and gravity. On the basis of this structure, the inner thread on the wall, different lengths of liquid extraction channel and tangential gas return channel are designed individually to study their effect on the separation efficiency. Experiments were carried out to investigate the separation performance of the separator. The results show that when the superficial velocity of gas reaches 20 m/s, the separation efficiency can be higher than 94% with the superficial velocity of liquid in a large range of 0.02–0.264 m/s. The design of inner thread is beneficial for separation when the liquid film has a certain thickness. The length of liquid extraction channel has an opposite influence on separation efficiency at low gas velocity and high gas velocity. The gas return flow channel deteriorates the separation performance for the reason that the returning gas will carry a large number of liquid droplets into the main pipe.