Performance Investigation and Optimization of the Primary Separation Part of the Oil-Gas Separator

Oil-gas separators are significant in the safe and reliableoperationof the natural gas storage system. The separation efficiency of theconventional primary separation part of the oil-gas separator wasnot high enough, causing the insufficient performance of the wholeseparator. Three modification schemes were proposed to optimize theprimary separation part of the oil-gas separator, including addinga curved baffle at the entrance, forming a centrifugal separationthrough the tangential inlet, and forming a cyclone structure by addingan inner cylinder. The separation performance was obtained throughthe Eulerian-Lagrangian approach numerically. For each scheme,a variety of parameter combinations were designed by the orthogonalarray and the structure with the highest separation efficiency wasreasonably selected. The separation efficiency of the centrifugalstructure was higher than that of the collision structure on the whole.To evaluate the feasibility of the practical application, the threestructural schemes were compared coupled with the analytic hierarchyprocess (AHP) based on the separation efficiency, the pressure loss,the uniformity of filter inlet velocity, and the modification cost.The results showed that the scheme of adding a curved baffle withreasonable structural parameters at the entrance had better comprehensiveperformance, which could be used as the optimal scheme in improvingthe oil-gas separator applied in natural gas storage.