The wellstream arrives at the inlet moving fast, and velocity works against everything a separator is trying to do. The first thing it meets inside the vessel is the inlet diverter, which breaks the stream's momentum and drops most of the liquid out of the gas immediately.

As the liquid is settling, it needs to stay calm, and the waves surging on the surface throw off both separation and every controller reading that level downstream. This is where a wave baffle comes in to keep the liquid surface calm enough for the layers to hold and the controls to read them accurately.

Gas leaving the top of the vessel still carries small liquid droplets with it, and gravity alone is not enough because those droplets are too small to settle out on their own in the time the gas spends inside the vessel. Therefore, the separator forces the issue instead with a vane pack and a mesh pad, two internals built to make droplets collect and combine instead of just filtering them out. The training animates the process and explains how each component enforces that.

In a three-phase separator, oil and water settle out by gravity, with oil floating on top. The vessel still needs a way to pull that oil off without dragging water along with it, and that's the weir plate's entire job. As oil rises high enough, the weir plate stands as a divider for the oil to spill over into its own compartment while water stays behind. The training covers how the weir is positioned and sized to make that split hold up.

Oil then leaves through the oil compartment's own outlet, while water leaves through the main compartment's outlet. As the liquids head downstream, a vortex breaker sits over each outlet nozzle to stop them from swirling on the way out, since a swirl at the outlet would recombine layers and undo all the work the separator just accomplished.