Abstract: In order to explore the influence of produced liquid temperature on the separation performance of hydrocyclone for oil-water separation(referred to as hydrocyclone), the parameters of the flow field, oil phase distribution and the separation efficiency of hydrocyclone were studied by the method of experiment and numerical simulation. The results showed that, in the research range, the tangential velocity, pressure and turbulent kinetic energy of the mixture in the separation flow field and the radial settling velocity of oil drop were positively correlated with temperature. The increase of the tangential velocity, pressure and the radial settling velocity improved the separation performance of hydrocyclone. Moreover, with the increase of produced liquid temperature, the volume fraction of oil in the axis was increased by 13.97 percentage points, the non-uniformity of oil phase volume distribution was decreased to less than 80%, the average diameter of the oil wick decreases by 0.16 mm, and the enrichment degree of oil phase at the axial was also increased. Ultimately, when the produced liquid temperature was higher than 70 ℃, the separation efficiency was more than 99%, and the separation performance of hydrocyclone was the best.

Key words: oil/water separation, hydrocyclone, temperature, separation performance, numerical simulation