I-SEP

The I-SEP™, developed and patented by Caltec, is at the leading edge of separation technology.

I-SEP is a very compact, dynamic separator with no moving parts, designed to separate streams of oil, gas, water and solids into their component phases. It is lightweight, simple to operate and requires no additional power input, utilising only the energy in the incoming process stream to generate high centrifugal forces on the process fluids.

The I-SEP is a deceptively simple and robust device. In comparison to conventional gravity separators, the I-SEP has a similar performance (separation efficiency and pressure drop), but has many more advantages, including:

• The physical size of the I-SEP is much, much smaller than its conventional counterparts: this means that the weight and hydrocarbon inventory is much reduced, making it inherently safer.
• The I-SEP system can also be adapted to cope with a wide range of operating conditions including transients and has been shown to be very effective at slug handling and suppression .
• Where solids are present and extreme erosion likely, the I-SEP can be lined with ceramics, which allow a service life of 200 times that of steel. These internal linings are very easy and relatively inexpensive to replace.

For many applications no active control is needed for the I-SEP. In applications where transients are expected, or a large turndown needed then a simple control philosophy involving the control of the differential pressure across the outlets is used. By altering the differential pressure across the two outlets, the flow-split ratio is altered, therefore altering the separation efficiency for the selected phase. This method can be manual or automated.

Little instrumentation is needed for the I-SEP. The inlet pressure and temperature, as well as the differential pressures across the outlets, is all the instrumentation that is required.

With no moving parts in the I-SEP, very little or no maintenance is required.

Caltec has developed optimized I-SEPs for a number of separation duties and have the ability, through proprietary software, to design and predict the performance of the I-SEPs.