An eulerian-eulerian approach for oil&gas separator design conference Paper

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AN EULERIAN-EULERIAN APPROACH FOR OIL&GAS SEPARATOR DESIGN
Conference Paper
· March 2017
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Gianluca Montenegro
Politecnico di Milano
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1 
AN EULERIAN-EULERIAN APPROACH
FOR OIL&GAS SEPARATOR DESIGN 
 
N. Scapin
1
, L. Cadei
2
,
 M. Montini
2
, G. Montenegro
1
, A. Bianco
2
, S. Masi
2
1
Politecnico di Milano
, 
2
ENI SpA.
This paper was presented at the 13
th
Offshore Mediterranean Conference and Exhibition in Ravenna, Italy, March 29-31, 2017. It was 
selected for presentation by OMC 2017 Programme Committee following review of information contained in the abstract submitted by the 
author(s). The Paper as presented at OMC 2017 has not been reviewed by the Programme Committee. 
 
ABSTRACT 
This paper presents a novel CFD analysis of an Oil& Gas separator, based on a multi-fluid Eulerian-
Eulerian model of the Navier-Stokes equations, implemented in OpenFOAM®. The simulation of a 
three-phase separator poses a particular challenge to the numerical modeling of transport 
phenomena since the three-phase flow can span across multiple flow regimes from disperse to 
separate. To handle such complex behavior, a new three-phase Eulerian-Eulerian solver has been 
implemented in OpenFOAM with a fully implicit treatment of drag terms and with the capability to 
describe both disperse and separate flow at high, fully coupled phase fractions. Furthermore, the 
mixture turbulence model implemented in OpenFOAM for bubble flows has been improved. Firstly, 
the source term of the turbulent kinetic energy has been modified with a more regime-independent 
formulation derived from the literature. Then, the derivation of the same model has been extended 
in order to manage the three phases.
The work represents an improvement both from an academic and industrial perspective: it provides 
a consistent numerical framework for a multiphase flow involving a number of phases higher than 
two; it replaces the traditional Eulerian-Lagrangian approach with the more appropriate Eulerian-
Eulerian one for the analysis of industrial production facilities. These two aspects allow to describe 
more accurately the flow pattern transitions and to numerically capture the separation and phase 
inversion phenomena inherent to the system.