EVALUATION OF OPTIMUM CONFIGURATIONS FOR COMPOSITE OILFIELD THREE-PHASE SEPARATOR PRESSURE VESSEL

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Piping stress analysis engineer, Engineering for the Petroleum & Process Industries Company - ENPPI, Cairo, Egypt (corresponding

2 Professor, Menoufia University, Faculty of Engineering, Production Engineering & Mechanical Design Department, Egypt,

3 Assistant Professor, Menoufia University, Faculty of Engineering, Production Engineering & Mechanical Design Department, Egypt,

Abstract

Gravity three-phase separators consist of pressure vessel with multiple internals that utilize
gravity settlement to separate gas/water/oil free from each other. The pressure vessel represents the
substantial element of such separators. Limited work has been reported on investigating fluid
contained multilayered filament-wound composite pressure vessels. However, destructive testing
with full scale or subscale is the best method to determine the structural characteristics of filament￾wound pressure vessels as it requires an excessive cost. In this study, three parametric numerical
models have been undertaken to represent three load cases namely; pure pressure, operating, and
hydro-test load cases in order to predict optimum lay-up for filament-wound pressure vessels of s￾glass/epoxy, carbon/epoxy composite laminates and hybrid of both for certain configurations.
ANSYS (ACP) 17.0 commercial software was used for simulation and analysis. ANSYS
Workbench design point parameters were used to construct parametric models. A developed
mathematical solution used from cited work was employed for results verification using Tsai-Wu
failure criterion for the safe design assessment in terms of safety factor. The findings indicate that
for operating load case, optimum lay-up should be selected according to foreseen loading ratio
acting upon pressure vessel during its lifetime, and hydro-test load case is safe for all studied lay￾ups also.

Keywords

ERJ. Engineering Research Journal
Volume 43, Issue 1
January 2020
Pages 23-39

Files

Share

How to cite

Statistics