A novel desander and deoiling hydrocyclone with a double vortex finder for treating sand/oil/water mixtures

Abstract This study investigates the impact of incorporating an internal vortex finder in the hydrocyclone overflow to enhance performance in terms of oil concentration using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) techniques. A three‐factor Box–Behnken design was employed to evaluate the influence of the internal overflow pipe diameter and the external overflow and underflow diameters. The optimal hydrocyclone configuration, designated as HC‐05, features an internal overflow diameter of 10 mm, an external overflow diameter of 17.5 mm, and an underflow diameter of 20 mm. This configuration achieves an overall total efficiency () of 90.4% while producing a more concentrated volumetric oil stream from the internal overflow and capturing 99.9% of all sand particles in the underflow.