Session: 11-13-01: Fluids and Public Health and Medicine / Industrial Flows

Paper Number: 166915

Field Testing of Mesofluidic Inline Separators 

The mesofluidic inline separator developed by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) represents an opportunity to decrease costs and simplify production of hydraulic fracturing sands.  Over 150 billion pounds of these hydraulic fracturing sands (proppant) (~$9.5 billion) were used annually in 2019 across the four (Permian, Eagle Ford, Bakken & Marcellus) largest US shale formation basins.  Mesofluidic inline separators are passive inserts that fit within existing piping systems.  These separators leverage techniques developed for microfluidic separation but have been scaled up to operate at industrially relevant conditions.  Mesofluidic inline separators in particular are similar to but distinct from microfluidic systems that originally separated the constituents of blood (e.g., red blood cells from white blood cells from platelets) and are now used to diagnose some types of cancers.  At PNNL over the past eight years, the team has scaled up these separators to accommodate much larger particles, to modularly fit within three inch pipes, and to operate at flow rates as high as 100 gpm (as opposed to 10 mL/h).  Like microfluidics, numbering up (several separators in parallel) is the key to rapid deployment.  Once the technology has been scaled up in a laboratory environment, modular separating elements are assembled into pucks, multiple modular pucks are assembled into a separation stage, and multiple separation stages may be assembled into a separations cascade where multiple separation targets are required to satisfy product specifications.  Multiple cascades may number up to achieve a target throughput.  Therefore, demonstrating separation precision at the laboratory scale is substantially similar to the separation precision achieved at scale.  In this manner, the cost and time to cross the “valley of death” from early prototypes to commercial product is substantially reduced.  

In this proceedings we describe preparing mesofluidic separators for a field demonstration to recover and concentrate drilling fluids.  These drilling fluids or drilling muds are a costly but vital part of the drilling process.  Recovering and recycling drilling fluids efficiently minimizes costs, improving return on investment.  Concentrating cuttings and waste muds minimizes transportation, waste processing, and disposal expenses, while having the added benefit of reducing overall environmental impact.  The particle separator is contained inside a small on-platform footprint and has no moving parts, which simplifies current mud handling processes and improves safety.  These innovative separators remove large particles, potentially replacing the need for screens or bulky rotating equipment.  These separators fit within existing piping systems, simplifying solids handling and mud control systems.

Despite this potential, mesofluidic separators have not previously been prepared for field demonstration.  Here we prepare separators to partition sand particles at 40 mesh (420 microns) and flowrates at ~50 to 100 gpm under turbulent conditions.  We show that at sufficiently high flowrates, the separator inserts can buckle and that beyond the laminar flow regime, cut off diameters vary with flowrate.  This conference proceeding describes the preparations for field testing of mesofluidic inline separators at a site in Colorado in collaboration with APEX Petroleum Engineering.  This work has implications for emerging efforts to separate high impact tonnage of critical materials.

Presenting Author: Judith Bamberger FEDSM2020 Chair and Senior Research Engineer, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Presenting Author Biography: Dr Bamberger is a Sr Research Engineer at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory specializing in slurry mixing, transport, and separations.

Authors:

Carolyn Burns Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Judith Bamberger FEDSM2020 Chair and Senior Research Engineer, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Jason Serkowski Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Michael Minette Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Leonard Pease Pacific Northwest National Laboratory