Building on a solid foundation of process and design expertise and proprietary hydrocyclone technology, Aker Solutions' deoiling hydrocyclones offer a distinct product range with significant advantages to customers and operators.
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Benefits of Aker Solutions' hydrocyclone technology
- With the multiple liner system, hydrocyclones offer great flexibility with respect to turn-down capacities. Cyclone liners can easily be replaced with blanks to accommodate for lower flows.
- Quick release closures allow easy access to the liners, for both turndown and maintenance purposes
- Base on static technology. As there are no moving parts, maintenance is low
- Liners can be packed vertically or horizontally
- Liners can be packed in single or twin vessel to optimize space needs
- Insensitive to motion
- Can handle oil in water inlet concentrations up to 2500ppm.
- Can reduce oil in water concentrations down to 25ppm
Liquid-liquid hydrocyclones offer a number of advantages over alternative systems. By being smaller, more efficient and impervious to the effects of motion and without moving parts they are ideal for retrofitting in small areas and on floating production vessels and rigs.
Operating principles
Liquid-liquid hydrocyclones operate on the principle of centrifugal separation. Utilising the pressure energy in the inlet fluid, immiscible fluids are separated by inducing a centrifugal flow path in a tapered tube. The induced spin forces the less dense fluid (called 'reject'), such as oil, to a central core and the more dense fluid, such as water, to the outside of the tube. The dense phase exits through an outlet at the far end of the hydrocyclone, while the light phase exits through a small orifice at the entrance end.
Predictable process efficiency
The deoiler performance is dependent on a number of variables, such as liquid density and viscosity, operating temperature and available pressure, inlet oil concentration and oil droplet size distribution. Although dependent on a number of variables, the system’s process efficiency can be predicted with a degree of accuracy subject to provision of the following data:
- Inlet, outlet and reject pressures
- Temperature and viscosity of oil fluids
- Dispersed phase particle size distribution
Unless the design is to be installed in an existing system, all the required information is mostly not available, therefore a combination of experience and interfacing with the design of other process units is of utmost importance. The produced water hydrocyclone system can be designed in conjunction with the separation train to produce the optimum, most economic solution.
Applications
The G-SepTM deoiling hydrocyclone technology is suitable for installation in a number of different applications and separation systems, including:
- Produced water clean-up
- High pressure condensate/water treatment
- Bilge water treatment
- Sub-sea water treatment
- Down-hole separation
- De-bottlenecking