Numerical Simulation of Solid-liquid Flow in Hydrocyclone

J. Zhang, X. You and Z. Niu

Abstract
Hydrocyclone is widely used as the centrifugal separation equipment to separate, classify and concentrate the product. In this paper, the multiphase flow models of mixture and Euler-Euler are used to simulate the internal three-dimensional flow field of hydrocyclone. It is found that compared to the experiment, the mixture model is shown to have the best performance among the models of mixture, Euler-Euler and discrete phase for the separation simulation when the diameter of solid particle is less than 30 μm. Otherwise, the discrete phase model holds the best performance. Furthermore, the field of static pressure, axial and tangential velocity, and volume fraction in the hydrocyclone is obtained by the mixture model. The outcome is very helpful to explain the separation procedure and optimize the hydrocyclone design.

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Keywords
Hydrocyclones, solid-liquid flow, separation, mixture model, Euler-Euler model