a new model for water droplet settlement in crude oil; application for crude oil storage tanks

No wadays, as a result of oil fieldsaging, the increasing rate of water production has become a challenging pro blem for most crude dehydration and desalting plants the fact that such plants cannot meet the required crude oil specification has brought about increasing lo ad on the crude storage tanks in the current study, an inno vative mathe matical model is de veloped for dynamic prediction of the water cut and water drain rate the mo del makes use of a normal distribution for probability density of the water droplet sizes, discretizes the volume along the length, and updates number of each droplet size for each element after specified time step the mo del is successfully utilized for prediction of water cut and drain volume of a crude storage tank parameters, namely mean droplet size and standard de viation areestimated to tune the model with field data (drain volume) it is found that the modelhas great potential for water settlement prediction which can be used to prepare a more efficient draining procedure for crude oil storage tanks the optimize d parameters are estimated 3856 µm and 783e-06 for mean droplet size and standard de viation respectively corresponding to aardof 476 %