Design and performance study of a two-stage inline gas-liquid cyclone separator with large range of inlet gas volume fraction

With the advantages of high separation efficiency and less footprint, the inline gas-liquid cyclone separator has gained wide attention in the fields of petroleum, chemical industry, nuclear energy and aerospace. However, single-stage gas-liquid cyclone separator usually cannot accommodate a large range of inlet gas volume fractions. For gas-liquid cyclone separator operating in series with the same structure, it is difficult to operate the second stage efficiently. Therefore, a new two-stage inline gas-liquid cyclone separator is designed in this study considering the bubble size and the variation of inlet gas volume fraction. It integrates the advantages of horizontal and vertical inline gas-liquid cyclone separator, so as to meet the separation requirement for both gas and liquid. The tangential velocity, gas volume fraction and pressure distribution inside the separator are studied by numerical simulation using Computational Fluid Dynamics. The experimental results show that the optimal standardized flow split is about 1.0. When the inlet gas volume fraction varies from 10% to 90%, the degassing efficiency gradually increased with a maximum value of 8.88%. Meanwhile, the dehydration efficiency gradually decreases, with a maximum value of 4.24%. In addition, the maximum pressure drop of the two-stage inline gas-liquid cyclone separator is only 140 kPa during the process of experimental test. This research can provide efficient solution to the working condition with wide range of inlet gas volume fraction and to meet the requirement of high compactness as well.