Oil-gas separators are significant in the safe and reliable
operation
of the natural gas storage system. The separation efficiency of the
conventional primary separation part of the oil-gas separator was
not high enough, causing the insufficient performance of the whole
separator. Three modification schemes were proposed to optimize the
primary separation part of the oil-gas separator, including adding
a curved baffle at the entrance, forming a centrifugal separation
through the tangential inlet, and forming a cyclone structure by adding
an inner cylinder. The separation performance was obtained through
the Eulerian–Lagrangian approach numerically. For each scheme,
a variety of parameter combinations were designed by the orthogonal
array and the structure with the highest separation efficiency was
reasonably selected. The separation efficiency of the centrifugal
structure was higher than that of the collision structure on the whole.
To evaluate the feasibility of the practical application, the three
structural schemes were compared coupled with the analytic hierarchy
process (AHP) based on the separation efficiency, the pressure loss,
the uniformity of filter inlet velocity, and the modification cost.
The results showed that the scheme of adding a curved baffle with
reasonable structural parameters at the entrance had better comprehensive
performance, which could be used as the optimal scheme in improving
the oil-gas separator applied in natural gas storage.