Experimental and CFD investigation on effects of internals on the flow pattern and performance of a divergent cyclone separator

Abstract

In order to improve the separation efficiency of a divergent cyclone separator, a kind of combined internals of a spiral guide vane and a central column was proposed. In this work, experimental tests and numerical simulations were performed to investigate the effects of the internals on the flow pattern and separation performance of a divergent cyclone separator. The Eulerian–Lagrangian approach was used for the gas–solid two-phase flow in this study. The numerical model has been validated by the experimental results and the data in the literature. Results show that the internals provides a higher tangential velocity not only in the main separation region but also in the dust-bin region. Moreover, the internals leads to reduce the turbulence intensity. The highest turbulence kinetic energy is reduced by 80% at most. With the internals, the particle cut-off diameter was reduced to 0.6 μm from 1.18 μm of the common one at the 18 m/s inlet gas velocity. By comparing the weighted factor, the novel design provides a 44.4% better in separation performance than the reference one.