Enhancing Water Separation from Paraffinic Crude using Ultrasound followed by Centrifugation

Summary Oil Demulsification is an essential part of oil processing as it reduces the water content in crude oil, thus improving its quality. Nowadays, various demulsifiers are used to enhance emulsion breakdown process but on the other hand they add cost to the company. This technical paper aims at breaking water-in-oil emulsion with the help of ultrasound followed by centrifugation. The experiment was performed on paraffinic crude taken from ONGC Mewad Asset Well No 37. The process was employed for different sonicating time in order to demulsify samples of stable water-in-oil emulsion. While sonication helped in separating individual phases of oil and water, centrifugation speeds up the recovery of these phases. The important feature of this experiment is that separation of oil & water is done without the help of any demulsifier. Experimental results were generated for recovery percentage for different samples at different sonicating time.