Simulation of Coalescence and Breakup of Dispersed Water Droplets in Continuous Oil Phase

Abstract

Petroleum industry uses shear devices such as chokes, valves, orifices and pumps, which cause droplet coalescence and breakup making the downstream separation process very challenging. Droplet-droplet coalescence leads to formation of larger droplets, which accelerate the phase separation, whereas the breakup of larger droplets into smaller ones delays the separation process. Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) simulations are conducted by ANSYS-Fluent software to track the droplet breakup and droplet-droplet coalescence, where the interfaces between the two phases are tracked by the Volume of Fluid (VOF) model. The material of droplet is water, while the continuous phase is oil. In this study, the effect of variables such as droplet diameter, droplet relative velocities as well as droplet motion directions on the time evolution of droplet-droplet coalescence and breakup is evaluated. The simulation results confirm that smaller droplet collisions lead to coalescence under wide ranges of droplet relative velocities, while larger droplet collisions result in droplet breakup at higher relative velocities. During coalescence, two droplets combine into one droplet, which deform in several times from one direction to orthogonal direction until recovering its shape or breakup. In addition, the simulation results show that fastest coalescence takes place when droplet collisions occur at optimum relative velocity, whereas droplet breakup occurs at higher velocities than the optimum velocity, and delay in coalescence happens at lower velocity. Furthermore, the simulation results clearly show that droplet moving direction play an important role in the occurrence of droplet coalescence and breakup. Comparison of the simulation results with the collected experimental data from literature confirm that the simulations are capable of predicting the evolution time of the droplet coalescence and breakup with high accuracy.