CFD Modelling Investigation of Hydrocyclone Solid Separation Efficiency in Petroleum Upstream Oil Production

In the wide landscape of upstream oil production, an essential challenge engineers often face is the contamination of crude oil with impurities such as sand. The inevitable drawbacks of sand contamination, such as pig blockages and control valve failures, reinforce the necessity of separators. Various types of separators are used in industry to remove impurities, including three-phase separators, gravity separators, and hydrocyclone separators. Hydrocyclone is a very efficient alternative, with a simpler design and higher throughput capacity than its competitors. A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis of the hydrocyclone solid separation efficiency is presented in this work. A research gap was identified: among the several structural parameters that affect a hydrocyclone’s separation efficiency, prior research on inlet angles is limited. This study investigates the effects of inlet angles on the performance of a hydrocyclone handling a crude oil–sand mixture, in contrast to previous studies that focused on other solid–liquid systems, such as water-based slurries. It aims to examine the effects of varying inlet angles on velocity and pressure distributions, pressure drop, and overall solid separation efficiency using the Reynolds Stress Model (RSM) turbulence model. The results compare different inlet angles and identify the optimal configuration that balances high sand separation efficiency with a stable pressure drop.