| Over the past 40 years far more work has gone into studying primary dispersions than secondary dispersions. In spite of what has been done, a large number of interacting factors that govern the separation of immiscible liquids remains unquantified. Therefore, detailed experiments were carried out on secondary oil in water dispersions in industrial and lab-scale packed-bed coalescers to study the impact of surface properties of the packing media on separation efficiency. Based on the experiments performed on the industrial packed-bed coalescer, it was concluded that oleophobic packing offered better separation performance than oleophilic packing. It was also noted that under similar situations, a packing with a higher surface roughness is preferred over a smooth one. Sauter mean diameter of the dispersed phase drops was also correlated with the height of packing. Based on experimental results and dimensional analysis, a model is presented that correlates the steady state Sauter mean diameter of the dispersed drops with physical properties of the fluids. Thus, combining Equations 11 and 13 gives a good preliminary estimate of packing performance. |
