Abstract
As most of the oil fields gradually come to the middle and late exploitation period, the crude oil production becomes more complex, stable and water cut is also very high. This has brought challenges to oil-water separation in onshore and offshore production trains especially for the demulsification and dehydration of crude oil. In particularly, the pre-separation efficiency of conventional three-phase separators installed at the front position of the crude oil processing systems are severely affected. In this paper, we explored the demulsification performance of W/O emulsion in an electric field-enhanced separator with insulated electrode assembly inside by static demulsification experiment and dynamic demulsification experiment separately. Focused beam reflectance measurement (FBRM) was used to make real-time online measurements of water droplet sizes in the emulsion. The average water droplet diameters, distribution of droplets within certain size and water content in oil outlet of the separator are set as indicators for evaluating the dehydration performance. The effect of electric voltage, frequency, water content and inlet flowrate on the demulsification performance were both investigated. Experimental results showed that the high frequency AC electric field with insulated electrode can promote the growth of small water droplets and thus contribute to the demulsification. The dehydration performance is deteriorated drastically with the increase of inlet water content or flowrate. The electrical field parameters such as electrical voltage and frequency both have obvious effect on the diameter distribution of dispersed water droplets and water contents at oil outlet of the separator. For certain inlet water content 20% and inlet flowrate 0.3 m3/h, the optimal electrical voltage is 5 kV and frequency is 3 kHz. The research results can provide guidance for the optimization and performance improvement of the electric field-enhanced separator.
NSTL
Elsevier