Dispersed droplet dynamics during produced water treatment in oil industry

For Lagrangian particle tracking applied to swirling flow produced water treatment the influence of the history force is investigated. In the expression for the history force an existing Reynolds number dependent kernel is adapted and validated for a range of experimental data for settling spheres. This kernel is used during the numerical simulation of oil-droplets in an idealized flow field as model for flow fields observed in swirling flow separators. It is shown that the history force should not be neglected for the motion of particles in such flows. However, for this specific type of flow it is shown that the contribution of the history force might be approximated as a drag-like expression. Subsequently, an efficient collision detection mechanism is developed to obtain collision detection with a work-load of O(Np lnNp). The scheme is validated for settling spheres and applied to the swirling flow field used during the investigation of the influence of the history force. Finally, two approaches for the lattice Boltzmann method, taking into account the equation of state for water, are presented. One approach utilizing a pressure corrected BGK approximation, the other a dense gas BBGKY approximation. A novel approach is used to obtain the macroscopic quantities and boundary conditions. It is shown that for modeling the flow of water around a particle an ideal-gas lattice Boltzmann method to simulate water is not capable of capturing all relevant details. However, modeling the flow with both proposed approaches, which take the equation of state into account, lead to similar results.