CFD PREDICTION OF PRESSURE DROP AND FLOW FIELD IN STANDARD GAS CYCLONE MODELS

Pressure drop is an important performance parameter for cyclone separators. A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) study of the pressure drop in cyclones using the Reynolds stress (RSM) and the granular mixture models is presented in this paper. The study includes three different cases; pure gas at ambient temperature, pure gas at different temperatures, and particle-laden flow. The first two cases were reasonably well predicted while the presence of particles with a relatively high loading (up to 1 kg/m(3) of fluid) caused some discrepancies in the predicted results. The concept of entropy generation, used in this work, has permitted to detect regions of high frictional effect in the vortex finder, the bottom of the conical part, and at the interface separating the outer and the core streams. The simplifying assumptions employed in the CFD models and some numerical details are discussed.