Rhine Ruhr - Products - Separation Equipment

Rhine Ruhr is recognised as the leading supplier of a comprehensive
range of removable separator internals to the Oil & Gas Industries throughout the Asia Pacific Region.

Its world class products and services have gained a reputation for robust design, reliable performance and efficient technical support. The installation base includes virtually every major Oil and Gas Producer in the region and many others worldwide.

Rhine Ruhr’s leadership in the field is the result of well established, tried and tested, industry standard design concepts with unique mechanical enhancements to ensure effective and reliable performance.

A continuous program of research and development testing in its Melbourne pilot plant facility is used to evaluate equipment design and measure key performance parameters.

Immiscible liquids such as oil and water can be separated by gravity settling. The residence time required to effect separation depends both on system properties (such as density difference) and the dispersed droplet size. In a typical horizontal separation vessel with continuous flow, increasing residence time for separation requires larger vessels.

Vessel size can be reduced by fitting devices which favourably change the settling characteristics.

• Coalescer Packs such as mesh pads co-knitted with wettable fibres can be installed to increase the size of the dispersed liquid droplets and so reduce settling time.

• Parallel Plate Packs consist of metal plates which form narrow flow channels, angled to drain away coalesced liquid. This results in greatly reduced vertical settling distance for the dispersed droplets traveling between the plates before coalescing out on the plate surface.

Rhine Ruhr design and manufacture a range of devices to enhance separation.

These include Parallel Plate style devices (“Plate Packs”) as well as Honeycomb style coalescers (modified Dynapak structured packing). Depending on overall vessel design and fluid properties, these devices are capable of effective bulk removal of dispersed droplets in the range of 20 to 50 microns.

Feed inlets are engineered according to the nature of the feed.

• Feeds to KO Drums – either open nozzles or simple inlet baffles are generally adequate.

• Bulk Separators – benefit from a mechanically robust inlet device designed for vapour/liquid
disengagement as well as reducing momentum. (Tangential inlet devices such as Cyclone or Vane Style Configurations are the typical industry standard.)

Rhine Ruhr design and manufacture removable Vane Inlet Devices to suit design conditions for most Bulk Separation applications.

Vessels designed for the Separation of immiscible fluids may be categorized as follows:

• Knock Out Drums – normally vertical vessels designed to separate entrained liquid droplets
from a vapour stream. Typical internals are either Vertical Flow Knitted Wire Mesh Mist Eliminators or Vane Type Mist Eliminators configured for horizontal flow.

• 2-phase Vapour/Liquid Separators – either vertical or horizontal vessels, designed to perform bulk separation from a 2-phase feed. Typically, as well as requiring Mist Eliminators for liquid droplet separation (as for KO Drums described above), an inlet device may be installed at the feed inlet to enhance vapour/liquid disengagement.

• 3-phase Separators – generally horizontal vessels are preferred in order to provide optimum conditions for gravity settling of the immiscible liquid phases. The major difference from a 2-phase Separator is the addition of an outlet or overflow baffle to decant off the light liquid phase into a separate collection compartment. A liquid/liquid coalescer such as a Plate Pack can also be included to enhance separation.

• 2-phase Liquid/Liquid Separators – differ from 3-phase Separators in that they have no provision or vapour flow or vapour/liquid disengagement. Since they are frequently designed to separate a dispersed liquid from a single continuous phase, a collection boot is more space efficient than an overflow weir.

Mist Eliminators/Droplet Separators

A wide range of Mist Elimination devices are available depending upon the degree of separation required.

Devices used for removal of droplets in the range of 5 microns and above use inertial impaction.

Pads of knitted wire mesh are cost effective and very efficient in the range of 5 to 10 microns.

Well designed Vanes have higher capacity but will remove droplets only as small as 10 to 20 microns, depending upon physical properties and service conditions. Rhine Ruhr has developed a complete range of Vane or Chevron style Droplet Separators to suit most Mist Elimination duties.

• VC style for vertical flow and high particulate loading.

• HC style for horizontal flow

• DHC (double pocket) high efficiency style

• HC and DHC style Vanes are normally incorporated into “Vane Packs”, complete with drainage sump and downpipes, to avoid liquid bypass and re-entrainment.