CFD Assessment and Experimental Investigation of the Liquid Separation Efficiency Enhancements in a Vertical Gravity Separator

Abstract

Three design enhancement options for a vertical gravitational flash tank separator were proposed and investigated in this work. Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) was used to assess the optimum configurations of the vertical gravitational flash tank separator. A series of experiments were performed to test the CFD proposed configurations of the enhancement design options. This paper also assessed the usefulness of CFD in flash tank design, and this is achieved through experiments and simulations on a range of relevant configurations using water as the working fluid. The results revealed that the combination of the inlet flow direction and extractor had a significant effect on the performance of the vertical flash tank separator which increased by 2%. The results also revealed that there was a good agreement between the CFD simulations and experiments; the CFD simulations underestimated the liquid separation efficiency by approximately 0.02 over the range of conditions tested.