CFD simulation of an industrial gas condensate electrostatic desalter: a case study

A desalter is a process equipment in a gas refinery that removes saline water from natural gas condensate. in this study, to predict the electrostatic desalter performance in refinery no. 4, south pars, iran, a 3d computational fluid dynamics (cfd) simulation considering the population balance model based on eulerian-eulerian two-phase flow was performed. the continuity and time-averaged navier-stokes equations were solved by the finite volume method. to assess the water droplets' coalescence and consider the role of the electric field under the dc current a user-defined function (udf) was written and compiled to the fluent. to validate the cfd results, the calculated volume fraction of the water phase was compared with industrial data. also, two different operating conditions were considered for better evaluation. the main goal was how cfd simulation by using one section instead of the main geometry can solve all complexity of the process. the results showed that between two electrodes, the coalescence of droplets was greater, and also droplets size distribution in the water outlets indicates the percentage of smaller-sized groups was decreased, and the larger size groups gain value.