Proceedings of the
International Conference on Mechanical Engineering 2009
(ICME2009) 26- 28 December 2009, Dhaka, Bangladesh

ICME09-FM-28

A MODIFIED EULERIAN-LAGRANGIAN APPROACH FOR
SOLVING MULTI-PHASE FLOW APPLIED TO A COMPACT
DOWN-HOLE SUB-SEA GAS-LIQUID SEPATATOR

Shakil Ahmed1, Gerardo Sanchez Soto1, Jamal Naser2 and Edson Nakagawa1
1CSIRO Earth Science and Resource Engineering, Technology Park Kensington, Perth
2School of Engineering and Industrial Sciences, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn,
Melbourne

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a modified Eulerian-Lagrangian approach for solving multi-phase flow applied to a laboratory scale gas-liquid separator designed for high gas content. The separator consists of two concentric pipes with swirl tube in the annular space between the pipes. The gas-liquid mixture comes from the tangential side inlet and the system works with a combination of gravity and centrifugal forces to achieve a high-efficient gas-liquid separation. In the modified Eulerian-Lagrangian method, gas flow is coupled with the spray and wall film models. Spray model involves multi-phase flow phenomena and requires the numerical solution of conservation equations for the gas and the liquid phase simultaneously. With respect to the liquids phase, discrete droplet method (DDM) is used. The droplet-gas momentum exchange, droplet coalesces and breaks-up, droplet-wall interaction with wall-film generation and entrainment of the water droplet back into the gas stream are taken into account in this investigation. To be consistent with the experiments the same air water mixture is used for the present work. The standard k-ε turbulence model is used for turbulence closure. The predicted results from the modified Eulerian-Lagrangian multi-phase model explain the complex flow behavior inside the separator and are in good agreement when compared with experiments.
 

Keywords: Modified Eulerian-Lagrangian Approach, Compact Gas-liquid Separator, Multi-Phase Flow.

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