Abstract
A vane demister is widely used for separating tiny droplets from gas streams in the petroleum industry, chemical engineering, and other industries. To obtain optimal structure and operation parameters, a method based on orthogonal experiment design is often adopted. However, in most cases, results from an orthogonal experiment design are suboptimal solutions when there are fewer experiments to optimize the vane demister performance. In this study, to obtain the maximum separation efficiency and minimum pressure drop, Fluent software was used to simulate the two-phase flow of gas and liquid in vane demister with different structural parameters and operation parameters, generating 473 solutions as the sample database. Based on this database, a back propagation neural network was used to establish the prediction model for the separation efficiency and pressure drop, and a genetic algorithm was used for multi-target optimization of this model. The optimization results were compared to Fluent simulation results and the orthogonal experiment design results. The results show that a genetic algorithm generates better results. The optimal separation efficiency of both methods is 100%. However, the optimal pressure drop of the genetic algorithm is 25.77% lower than that of the orthogonal experiment design.
Highlights
During natural gas processing, liquid impurities carried by the natural gas can cause corrosion of pipelines and equipment and affect production
The optimal parameter combination was determined according to the experimental results, where the separation efficiency is 100% and the pressure drop is 36.91 Pa
The range analysis of orthogonal design results show that the vane angle and gas velocity are the two main factors that affect the separation efficiency and pressure drop
Summary
Liquid impurities carried by the natural gas can cause corrosion of pipelines and equipment and affect production. The vane demister is a commonly used demister because of its good maintainability. It removes entrained fine liquid droplets from a gas flow by inertial impingement. When the gas and entrained fine liquid droplets flow through narrow channels in a vane demister, the gas can pass through freely, whereas the small droplets cannot make the necessary sharp turns due to their inertia. Small droplets strike the channel walls, which results in the separation of gas and liquid.[1] A vane demister can separate droplets with diameters larger
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