Influence of Turbulence on the Processes of Creation and Destruction of Water-Oil Emulsions During Crude Oil Desalting

Abstract

It is shown that the additional turbulence of the flow in the processes of electric desalting of oil will substantially intensify existing technologies. Turbulence facilitates the mixing of the emulsion, the convergence of droplets and increases the probability of merging of droplets. The electric field contributes not only to the convergence of droplets, but also to the destruction of adsorption films around the drops. Therefore, combining the treatment of an emulsion in an electric field with a turbulent regime of its motion leads to a sharp improvement in the quality of oil demulsification. It is concluded that in order to find the optimal parameters for the operation of industrial devices, a theory is needed that, in addition to the droplet motion mechanism in turbulent vortices, also describes deformation of droplets, as well as the processes of destruction and the confluence of droplets. For studying the processes of changes in the topography of heterogeneous systems and the diagnosis of turbulent flows, the most promising is the numerical method for modeling the structure of flows.