Gas separator.

Quite often people face the need to clean products (both gas and gas condensate wells), protect gas pumping equipment and shut-off valves from moisture droplets, mechanical impurities and hydrocarbon condensate. To solve these problems, equipment was created called "gas separator". It is included in the composition of compressor stations, installations that conduct complex preparation of gas, gas distribution points and prefabricated points, gas processing plants.

The gas separator can be both self-contained and sectional.

Usually the separator is divided into three parts: preliminary separation, in which most of the impurities are separated; Settling, where the collected liquid is collected and preliminarily settled; And drip-drop, which cleans the gas from the smallest droplets of liquid.

The gas separator is equipped with devices that allow monitoring the gas temperature, its pressure and liquid level.

The types of this equipment are classified as follows:

- by the nature of the forces that affect the gas inside the device, they release the inertial (packing), gravitational, mixed type and centrifugal separator;

- on the position of the separators in space and in their geometric form, there is a cylindrical (horizontal, vertical, inclined) and spherical separator;

- according to the location of the collector for the separated liquid, the devices are provided with remote collectors located within the volume of the gas separator;

- the working pressure is high (more than 2.5 MPa), medium (0.6 to 2.5 MPa) and low (less than 0.6 MPa).

The gravitational gas separator acts on the principle of reducing the velocity of the gas contained in it to a value where the impurities in it are deposited by gravity . Such devices are structurally simple, but metal-consuming and cumbersome. The efficiency of separation is from 75 to 90 percent.

And what is a gas inertial separator, what is its principle of operation?

In it, the impurities settle because of multiple deviations with the aid of special gas flow nozzles. These nozzles are made of a different configuration of plates, coalescing packing and filtering materials. Most often used mesh and blind sections.

The separation efficiency is 95 to 99 percent. In the separators of gas centrifugal impurities precipitate on the walls of the housing under the influence of centrifugal forces arising during the rotation of the flow in an annular or cylindrical separation chamber.

The most advanced centrifugal single-stage gas separators of multi-cyclone and single-flow types can achieve efficiency in solid particles from 98 to 99.5 percent. Plus to that - smaller size and metal consumption than that of its inertial and gravitational counterparts. Their throughput capacity reaches 15 million cubic meters per day, at a pressure reaching 16 MPa and a temperature from minus 40 to plus 100 degrees Celsius and a starting content of liquids from 1 to 200 cubic centimeters per cubic meter.

The main directions for reducing metal consumption and improving the efficiency of separators are the use of mesh attachments, coagulation of aerosol contained in filters, improvement of aerodynamic flow characteristics in a separation chamber, use of column type separators and multifunctional purpose.

Centrifugal separators are industrial equipment designed to separate a gas stream that uses a centrifugal separation type. They refer to equipment that uses a swirling flow to separate multi-component gas systems.