FLUID DYNAMIC STUDY OF CYCLONIC SEPARATORS TO OIL WELLS THROUGH CFD TECHNIQUES

Several authors have reported problems related to sand production such as premature waste of equipment. This paper presents a study focused on CFD model of flow inside a downhole hydro-cyclonic separator. A fractional factorial design with two levels was applied to evaluate the effect of the inner pipe external diameter, inner inflow tubing diameter, number of helical channels, helical channel slops, vortex finder length, volumetric flow rate, viscosity, and density over tangential velocity and pressure drop. According to the results, two factors were found to improve the tangential velocity for high viscous flows, the vortex finder length and the number of helical channels. Finally, a regression model was proposed relating the pressure drop as a function of the eight parameters analyzed.