| dc.description.abstract | Subsea separators are very useful in the subsea for the separation of hydrocarbons and water. Its application has added value to the oil and gas industry as well as minimize the negative impacts of subsea operations on the environment. The objective of this thesis is to develop steady state and dynamic models in HYSYS. Then, comparatively investigate the separator model for optimization and control relative to a similar work by Tyvold.
Although HYSYS is based on perfect thermodynamic separation, it was possible to implement both steady state and dynamic models with non-ideal separators using the Real Separator capabilities of HYSYS. The HYSYS Real Separator capabilities offers the advantage of including carry over in order to match the separator design specification, and predicting the feed conditions or phase dispersion, device geometry, as well as inlet/exit devices on the carry over. The steady state model was optimized by performing simulations at different flow rates, oil cuts and residence time. The modelling approach was based on semi-empirical equations from stokes law, GSPA and Barnea & Mizrahi correlations. Several simulations were performed, on the HYSYS separator model, by varying the flow rates, oil cuts and residence time (factor) of the inlet stream: then, the separator efficiency was investigated by observing the purities of the product streams accordingly.
Detailed information on three phase horizontal separator in HYYS are scare: nonetheless, useful data were employed from several literatures to implement this model. Data from the fields and experiments are required to further fit/improve on same. The Dynamic model particularly requires further fitting on the boundary conditions with data from the field or experiment. However, some of the result showed agreement with Tyvold`s work which also showed agreement with available experimental data | |
