فهرست نشریات علمی دسترسی آزاد ایران

Separating two immiscible liquids from gas is essential to produce light liquid, heavy liquid, and vapor phases. Water separation from hydrocarbons is a practical example in the oil industry. For such separation in industry, a three-phase separator is used. In this study, different parameters and the weight of the three-phase separator were optimized with the genetic algorithm (GA). Finally, the total cost of manufacturing the separator was decreased. Different types of three-phase separators are vertical, horizontal, and spherical. The separator worked in operating conditions of 172 kPa and 445 K, and the actual weight of the separator was 8131 kg. For the optimization target, the flow of vapor, light liquid, and heavy liquid was considered constant during the optimization process. The objective function (OF) was obtained from the weight of the separator and three multiparameter equations. Also, seven parameters, including the separator aspect ratio (L/D), the height of heavy liquid (HHL), the height of light liquid (HLL), the hold-up time (TH), the surge time (TS), the low liquid level (HLLL), and the vapor level (Hv), were used in GA as constraints. The weight of the optimized separator was calculated at approximately 6001 kg. Hence, with this method, the total weight of the separator decreased by about 26.2 % as compared to the actual weight of the separator. On the other hand, the maximum difference between the answers was 3.3%, which was acceptable. Further, the error analysis of the predicted results was calculated by mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) for seven design parameters of the three-phase separator and separator weight, which were in an acceptable level of accuracy. The presented approach could have potential application for developing low-cost manufacturing of three-phase separators in the petroleum industry.