Despite the numerous advantages associated with using compact cylindrical cyclonegas/liquid separators, particularly for upstream production operations, the lack of a fullunderstanding of the complex hydrodynamic process taking place in it and its ??unfamiliarity?? tooil field personnel has hindered its widespread use. The complexity associated with thistechnology is attributed to two limiting physical phenomena, liquid carry-over and gas carryunder.While a lot of work has been done to better understand and predict the liquid carry-overoperational envelope, little or no information about methods capable of adequately predicting orcharacterizing the gas carry-under performance of such separators is available.Traditionally, to mitigate the gas carry-under phenomena, the use of complex controlalgorithms and systems has been employed. These systems make the technology expensive (asopposed to the potential cost reduction it promises) and impractical for realistic use in the oilfield where reliability is of critical importance.A simpler solution, the use of changeable or adjustable inlet-slots that regulate the artificialgravity environment created in the separator, could significantly improve the gas carry-underperformance of cylindrical cyclone separators.This research has focused primarily on the use of adjustable inlet-slots. Theoretical analysisand experimental data investigating the benefits of variable inlet geometry have been provided.This work lays the foundation or validation required to perform more tests on a field-scaleversion to verify the results presented here. A modular design of such a variable inlet-slot inletsectionhas the potential of simplifying the design and specifications of cylindrical cyclonegas/liquid separators.From the results of this investigation, it was found that the gas carry-under performance of acylindrical cyclone gas/liquid separator could be improved considerably over a wider range ofoperating conditions by adjusting the size of the inlet-slots. This contradicts earlier reports ofliquid carry-over improvement in separator performance.Also, for the first time, a simple method for theoretically analyzing the percent improvementin separator gas carry-under performance using the optimum g-force concept is presented. Thismethod could be incorporated into design software for determining the slot-size configurationrequired for varying separator-operating conditions.
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