This is a 3-meter wide, 13-meter tall geothermal separator. These are used in the geothermal power plant industry to separate brine from steam on geothermal well lines before the stream gets to the power plant. Two-phase geothermal fluid enters the separator at a high velocity and the combination of centrifugal force and gravity removes the majority of the brine entrained in the stream. Separation efficiency is key to turbine performance, and is measured in terms of steam quality, or the mass ratio of steam to brine in the outlet stream.
This particular separator is a novel design for a geothermal power plant located in Turkey, created by myself and the rest of the engineering team at my geothermal engineering consulting firm. The internal geometries (not pictured) are designed to improve separator efficiency over that of existing separators, from an estimated 96% steam outlet quality to 99.8%, resulting in measurably improved turbine performance.
In addition to designing the separators and working with the fabricators, my work on this separator also included performing Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) calculations to demonstrate the estimated performance under the given design flows. I used Salome to create 3-dimensional models of the separator and its internals, then performed CFD analysis using OpenFOAM, an open-source CFD modeling software platform, written in C++. The separators are currently being installed; flow data will be collected in the months following startup and will be used to further improve the CFD calculations and will aid in future separator design.
