Optimal design of perforated baffles for enhancing oil-water separation performance using genetic algorithms

• The change in the hole shape of the porous plate has a sensitive effect on the improvement of the separation efficiency of the three-phase oil and water separator. • The optimized diameter ratio of the hole cross-sectional area to be contracted or enlarged was obtained using the MOGA algorithm. • The optimized model showed a stabilized flow field, and the separation efficiency increased by 5 % compared to the reference model with a constant hole cross-sectional area in the flow direction. A study was conducted to optimize the shape of the perforated baffle, which is known to stabilize the fluid flow in the three-phase separator and increase the separation efficiency. A methodology was proposed to increase the interfacial stability of water-oil and maximize the separation performance by applying a hole shape that converges or diverges to the perforated baffle. Numerical simulations were performed using ANSYS Fluent. To secure the reliability of numerical analysis, the continuity residual was 10 −4 in 1.4 million grids through a grid dependency test, confirming that the separation efficiency converged to a constant value. The hole diameter ratio of the water-oil region was selected as an important design variable. DOE was performed using ANSYS DesignXplorer, and the separation efficiency was optimized using the MOGA algorithm. According to the results, when the hole diameter ratio in the oil region was 0.604 and the hole diameter ratio in the water region was 1.359, the separation efficiency reached 98.13 %, resulting in a 5.00 % improvement compared to the reference model (93.46 %) with a constant hole cross-sectional area.