• Journal of Ocean Engineering and Technology
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• v.29 no.5
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• pp.331-341
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• 2015

A degasser is a separation unit used in drilling to separate gas from the drilling mud. The degasser used in offshore drilling was developed at an early stage of drilling. Since its development, the design of the degasser’s internal structure has been optimized, with many limitations due to the restrictions of experimental and computational performance measurement methods. Despite the recent development of CFD technology for multiphase flow analysis, CFD has only been used in a limited way for degasser internal flow analysis and design optimization. In this study, a design optimization procedure for a degasser’s internal structure design was proposed, and CFD analyses of three types of internal structural designs were performed to evaluate the separation performance. The CFD result for each design type was used for the design optimization and, as the result, an optimized design is proposed.