The oil produced from offshore reservoirs normally contains considerable amount of water. The separation of water from oil is very crucial in petroleum industry. Studying the coalescence of two droplets or one droplet and interface can lead to better understanding of oil-water separation process. In this study, the coalescence of two droplets and droplet-interface are simulated using a commercial Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) code FLUENT 14. In order to track the interface of two fluids, two approaches, Volume of Fluid (VOF) and Level-Set method were utilized. The results are compared with experimental measurements in literature and good agreement was observed. The effect of different parameters such as droplet velocities, interfacial tension, viscosity of the continuous phase and off-center collision on the coalescence time has been investigated. The results revealed that coalescence time decreases as the droplet velocities increase. Also, continuous phase with higher viscosities and lower water-oil interfacial tension, increase the coalescence time.

Volume Subject Area:
Droplet-Surface Interactions
Topics:
Drops, Water, Computational fluid dynamics, Fluids, Separation (Technology), Surface tension, Viscosity, Collisions (Physics), Ocean engineering, Petroleum industry, Reservoirs
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