What happens when an oil/water mixture is introduced into an inclined plate separator?
The use of inclined plate separators to separate liquid oil/ water mixtures is widely accepted since the method of separation was first introduced into the oil fields to separate or strip natural gas from brine water-crude oil mixtures. The inclined plate method is an extremely good method for removing the gas from liquids where there are extreme differences in specific gravities of the components being separated. In the removal of oil from water, a system must maintain and control fluid motion to prevent turbulence. Thus, laminar flow must exist during the separation process. Consider the inclined plate separator. It uses stacked parallel plates configured at an angle of 45 to 75 degrees to the tank centerline, with an inlet opening of approximately 30% of the cross sectional area of the cylindrical tank. Due to the geometry, the length of the plate section cannot exceed 125% of the radius. A two phase mixture that enters this type of plate separator must attain laminar flow to cause
