Numerical study on the wall wear of hydrocyclones and experimental verification

Abstract

Because hydrocyclone wall wear affects the separation performance and causes production accidents, in this paper, a combination of numerical simulation and experimental study is used to investigate the wear of various components of the hydrocyclone. The wear degree of each hydrocyclone component is from large to small for the underflow orifice, cone, inlet annular region, roof, and column. The simulation results show that at the roof of the hydrocyclone, the wear phenomena are distributed in the outer circumference of the circle and increase with radius in the radial direction. At the inlet annular region, the main wear is caused by particle impact, and the most serious part is between 30° and 60° azimuth. In the column section, the main wear is scouring wear, and the wear trajectory is distributed in the form of a spiral belt. In the cone section,the wear rate is larger as it is closer to the underflow orifice, and reaches the maximum near the underflow orifice. The experiment results show that the morphology of the wear in each part is highly consistent with the simulated results, and the wear rate is slightly different in numerical value. The roof and column sections have roughly the same wear rate, the inlet annular region and upper cone section have similar wear rates, about 3.9 times that of the column section. The underflow orifice have the largest wear rate, about 4 times that of the upper cone section and 1.7 times that of the lower cone section.