Analysis of hydrocyclone as river water pre-treatment for tertiary coolant of RDE

Abstract

RDE is an experimental power reactor that planned to use Cisadane river water for its tertiary coolant. For maintaining the condenser reliability material its quality should be concerned. Therefore pre-treatment should be applied. Hydrocyclone is a separation device to remove larger solid particles from water. It can be an alternative component and installed for pre-treatment before water delivered to the water treatment system. Hydrocyclone designed to reduce solid particles concentration in water by means centrifugal forces. This paper discusses the hydrocyclone performance related to the solids particle separation efficiency of Cisadane river water. The amounts of solids that can be separated by an hydrocyclone will be explained. The ChemCAD sofware is used to simulate the cleaning process. The high efficiency hydrocyclone is used to simulate the separation process. The water intake is 50 m3/h and the solids particles size distribution majority more than 10 μm are set and the largest one is 100 μm is assumed. The amount of solids in water intake is 10% of total mass flowrate input. The hydrocyclone is installed in the first stage of cleaning system after water pump. The solid particles distribution are set in the inflows of cleaning system and the particles in hydrocyclone outlets are analyzed. At 0.3 m of hydrocyclone diameter the separation efficiency is 38%, and at the 1.1 m of diameter the efficiency is only 2.7%. The smaller diameter resulted higher separation efficiency, also causes the higher pressure drop and vice versa. The pressure drop increased significantly when the diameter is below 0.4 m. The dust particles size has been separated (D50) value is increase linearly from 12.18 to 71.27 micron with the hydrocyclone diameter from 0.3 to 1.1 m.