Numerical Simulation of Multiphase Flow in a Simple Two Phases Separator

Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) has been widely used in simulating fluid flows. In this paper, FLUENT 16.2 is employed to perform a numerical simulation of a multiphase flow system. Three different multiphase models, the VOF model, Mixture model, and Eulerian model, have been tested, to find the most suitable numerical model for an oil-water separation system. The velocity distribution, the fields of pressure and oil volume fraction are obtained for three models. The results show that the VOF model has the best separation efficiency among their models. By using the VOF model, the impact of oil concentration and flow rate on separation efficiency has been studied. Furthermore, for the VOF model, the separation process of the VOF model is presented by using phase volume fraction distribution as a function of time.