What Is a Steam Separator?

The steam-water separator is a carbon steel or stainless steel equipment with a pressure vessel structure, and the interface type is a flange structure DN16 / DN25 / DN40. The steam-water separator must be installed on a horizontal pipeline with the drain outlet vertically downwards. Bracket to reduce pipe load. To ensure that the separated liquid is quickly discharged, a suitable set of traps should be connected to the drain at the bottom of the soda separator. This type of valve should generally be installed horizontally in the pipeline.

MS9 steam / water separator is upgraded with baffle type, centrifugal type, swirl type, gravity type, baffle type and filled type steam / water separator. MS9 steam-water separator is a high-efficiency nano-filtration filter to more efficiently filter and remove droplets entrained in steam and compressed air systems.

Although the designs of separators are various, their purpose is to remove

If the steam-water separator is not insulated, the surface heat dissipation will increase the moisture content of the steam and lose a lot of heat. If the steam temperature is 150 ° C and the ambient temperature is 15 ° C, then increasing the heat preservation will save 8600MJ of heat annually (assuming radiant heat transfer, working 8760h a year), and increasing the heat preservation will save considerable energy in a short time Can save the cost of adding insulation. Special insulation sleeves should be used. Due to the special shape of the separator, especially in flange connection, the insulation is difficult, which limits the insulation effect.

Even the best insulation cannot completely eliminate heat loss, and the general insulation efficiency is 90%. It is very important to use a thermal insulation jacket specially designed for a special separator, otherwise the thermal insulation efficiency will decrease. A well-insulated separator will also reduce the risk of burns. ^[1]

With the continuous deepening of heavy oil mining in China, the method of steam injection with conventional boilers (so% steam dryness) has been unable to meet the growing needs of new technologies for heavy oil mining. According to the latest foreign research results, high-round recovery of heavy oil in the later stage of injection with more than 95% dryness of steam can effectively improve the recovery factor. At present, the steam dryness of steam injection boilers used in boilers is only about 75% when the boiler outlets are in actual operation, which cannot meet the process conditions for heavy oil steam thermal extraction. In order to solve the above problems, it is necessary to continuously consider looking for small separators with high efficiency and low investment in consideration of economic and changes in operating conditions, and effectively make the separation dryness of more than 95%, and meet the technical conditions of high dryness steam injection. .

Research Status of Steam Water Separator

In the oilfield injection and production process, in order to obtain high-dryness steam, vertical cylindrical steam-water separation devices and spherical steam-water separation devices are generally used. Although the manufacturing process of the vertical cylindrical steam-water separation device is relatively simple, the obtained steam dryness can only reach 93%, and the high-speed flow of the steam resonates with the shell during use, making the site noise very loud. The spherical steam-water separation device is a multiple-stage cyclone separation device installed in a spherical shell as a first-class steam-water separation device. The cyclone separation device is connected to the steam pipeline outside the casing through a steam inlet, and a wave plate separation device is provided at the upper steam outlet of the separation device As a two-stage steam-water separation device. The spherical steam-water separation device can increase the steam dryness to more than 95%, which can meet the requirements of thermal recovery steam injection in the oil field, and at the same time, it can better solve the noise problem of the separation device.

Working principle of spherical water separator

The main working principle of the spherical steam-water separator is cyclone separation.

When the steam enters the cyclone tube from the intake pipe, the airflow will change from linear motion to circular motion. Most of the swirling airflow spirals downward from the cylinder along the cylinder wall and flows toward the cone. This is the outer swirling flow. The steam generates centrifugal force during the rotation, and throws the denser droplets towards the cylinder wall. Once the droplets contact the cylinder wall, they lose their inertial force and fall by the momentum of the inlet velocity and downward gravity along the wall surface into the underflow mouth. When the rotating descending external swirling air reaches the cone, it moves closer to the center of the swirling cylinder due to the conical contraction structure. According to the "rotation distance" principle, its tangential speed is constantly increasing. When the airflow reaches a certain position at the lower end of the cone, that is, the same rotation direction is reversed from the middle of the swirl tube to the upward direction, and the spiral motion is continued to form an internal swirling airflow. The steam with higher dryness exits the cyclone through the overflow port. ^[2]