Modeling and Analyzing Hydrocyclone Performances

Abstract

Hydrocyclones have been used as an operational tool to separate liquids from solids in different industries for more than 50 years. Considering the importance of this issue, many experimental and numerical attempts have been made to estimate the performance of this tool regarding the resulting pressure drop and the separation efficiency (particles separation limit diameter). Most of the numerical studies for simulating the fluid flow pattern inside Hydrocyclones have been conducted using the ‘’Fluent’’ commercial software. The other alternative for this evaluation is the application of CFD in COMSOL Multiphysics. This work is mainly focused on studying the effect of entering tangent velocity and also determining the flow pattern by CFD simulation in the powerful COMSOL Multiphysics software. Thereafter, correlations proposed by a number of authors are compared with experimental data to evaluate their performances. Among them, the correlations suggested by Barth and Koch-Lich showed acceptable accordance with reference data and thus were chosen for sensitivity analysis. Based on the results, three geometrical parameters of the hydrocyclone body have considerable effects on the separation efficiency. The findings revealed that decreasing the outlet diameter and the inlet width result in increasing the efficiency of hydrocyclone while enlarging the body diameter has negative effects on it. Furthermore, the cyclone efficiency is enhanced as the density difference between fluid and solid and the input velocity becomes larger.