Paper: Separation Technology And Its Benefits In The Oilfield

The use of various separator designs, internals, and/or internal configurations can significantly enhance separation. The use of centrifugal inlet devices, in some cases, has been shown to increase vessel throughput up to eight hundred percent. Also, internal baffling and various coalescing media, including matrix plate coalescing sections and serpentine vanes, can improve the separator efficiency by eliminating short-circuiting and reducing foam. Inlet devices and vessel intemals are often used in retrofit applications to de-bottleneck facilities or simply improve performance using existing equipment. Furthermore, centrifugal separation may be utilized in vertical recycling separators and horizontal, in line recycling separators. These separators utilize tangential inlets or fixed vanes to generate centrifugal force and push the heavier liquid droplets to the vessel wall, scrubbing the gas. These technologies can be used as either