MC Series Desanding Hydrocyclone

Overview

Cyclotech MC Series Desanding Hydrocyclones have been specifically designed to meet the demanding environmental and physical requirements of the upstream oil and gas industry. These demands are onerous when compared to those of industries such as mineral processing and paper manufacture, which have traditionally widely employed solid/liquid cyclones. The MC Series Hydrocyclones are used for removing solids from produced water, sea water or liquid hydrocarbon streams. The most common applications are for produced water re-injection systems, protection of downstream produced water treatment equipment and one of the integral elements of Cyclotech’s sand handling and cleaning systems.

Principle of Operation

A hydrocyclone has no moving parts and achieves solid/liquid separation by virtue of a pressure drop across the unit. A slurry is forced under pressure into the inlet section of the liner via a tangential inlet port. This, together with a narrow cyclone diameter, causes the fluid to spin at high velocity, which creates a high g radial acceleration field. The solid particles, being the denser phase, are forced outwards to the hydrocyclone inner wall. Here, through internal hydrodynamic forces, the solids are ejected from the apex of the cyclone while the liquid exits counter currently via an axial port adjacent to the inlet. The separated solids are either:

Collected in either an integrated (as shown above) or separate solids accumulator, which can be periodically purged on line without interruption to the hydrocyclone operation;
Continuously separated from the apex of the desanding hydrocyclone vessel as a concentrated slurry stream, the flowrate of which can be managed using a Cyclotech PLD (Pressure Let Down device).

Either option avoids the requirement for duty/standby operation which respresents a significant advantage over conventional filtration equipment.

MC Series Desanding Hydrocyclone Liner Design

The MC Series Desanding hydrocyclone geometries have been developed in house and have undergone rigorous testing both in the laboratory and in the field. The trade off between Desanding Hydrocyclone separation efficiency and capacity is a strong function of hydrocyclone diameter. The smaller the diameter, the smaller the particles that can be separated but the lower the capacity of each hydrocyclone. Cyclotech offer three model sizes within the MC Series range to ensure that an optimised technical and commercial solution can be offered for the diverse range of solids management applications that exist in this industry:

MC-25 Fine Solids Removal
Duty: Water Polishing, PWRI
Limits: Max Particle Size - 2mm
MC-50 Standard Sand Removal
Duty: Produced Water Desanding, PWRI, Sand Cleaning
Limits: Max Particle Size - 5mm
MC-100 Coarse Sand Removal
Duty: Equipment Protection
Limits: Max Particle Size - 15mm

In the MC Series configuration, large numbers of small diameter Desanding Hydrocyclones are installed in a single vessel to achieve high sand removal efficiencies at high flow rates. In all cases, the liner packing is highly efficient which allows Cyclotech to offer highly compact vessel designs.

Cyclotech manufacture the MC series hydrocyclone liners from various engineering grade alumina ceramics as standard but for highly erosive applications, Reaction Bonded Silicon Carbide, an extremely hard wearing advanced ceramic, is used providing typically six times the wear life of a standard alumina ceramic equivalent.

High Turn Down (HTD) Vessel Design

For applications requiring very high turndown, Cyclotech offers its HTD compartmentalised vessel approach. Internal baffles are used to divide the vessel into either two or more compartments. Each compartment can be switched in or out of service using external valving, effectively providing a number of hydrocyclone liner banks within a single vessel housing. This operation can be automated. The Cyclotech HTD design has considerable benefits over traditional methods to increase turndown as it removes the need for either blanking liners or multiple vessels. In a typical installation, the Cyclotech HTD design can increase turndown from 3:1, a typical value for a conventionally designed vessel, to 10:1 for a two compartment HTD vessel and over 50:1 for a three compartment HTD vessel. The use of a more efficient liner model in the MC Series range can increase these quoted turndowns still further.

New-Build Systems

Cyclotech’s MC Series Desanding hydrocyclone systems form an integral part of our Produced Water Treatment and Sand Management capability. These new build systems can range from fully automated packaged systems to stand alone vessels. Standard pressure vessel designs are available at most design pressures and temperatures and to most common design codes such as PD5500, ASME VIII or GOSTR. Materials of construction range from standard and low temperature carbon steels through to most stainless steels such as Duplex, 6Mo, Super Duplex, 625, 825 and other high end alloy steels.

Field Testing.

Cyclotech has a range of MC Series single liner test units (up to 300#), which can be used to determine the separation performance of the differing MC Series models on live fluids. These test units are compact, require no utilities and come complete with all required valving, instrumentation and hosing. Cyclotech can also perform a full particle characterisation analysis of the existing Produced Water Treatment as part of these performance trials. This includes particle size distribution, average solids concentration and oil on solids analyses.

Leased Equipment

Cyclotech own a fleet of flexible, production scale (up to 20,000 bpd) skid mounted Sand Management packages available on long or short term lease contracts. The equipment is available globally but supported at a local level which allows Cyclotech to assist the customer in the design, integration, operation and manning of these temporary systems.

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