Abstract: Heavy oil with sand brings serious safety hazards to ground production facilities and export pipelines, and the high viscosity of heavy oil causes difficulties in oil-sand separation. Optimizing the cyclone structure and exploring the range of feeding conditions for efficient cyclone desander are of great significance in realizing the cyclone desanding of highly viscous heavy oil. To this end, numerical simulation was used to study the desanding rate and pressure drop under different heavy oil viscosities, water cuts, and cyclone geometries. The results show that the viscosity of the oil-water mixture has a significant effect on the sand separation efficiency, which is much larger than the effect of the cyclone structure on the desanding effect; the inlet diameter, the overflow diameter, and the length of the cone section of the cyclone structure parameters have the most significant effect on the cyclone field and the sand desanding rate; the control of the diversion ratio could reduce the oil phase flowing from the bottom outlet and the waste of resources, but the control of the diversion ratio is only effective and meaningful under the conditions of high viscosity and low water cut. The results of this study can provide a reference for the optimization of heavy oil cyclone desander structure and the design of the cyclone desanding process.

Key words: desanding, cyclone separation, cyclone, heavy oil