CFD for Cyclone Optimization for Liquid Extraction From Solid Particles in Turbulent Air Flows

CFD based design optimization for liquid extraction using cyclone is presented in this paper. The extraction process is liquid extraction from solid particles in turbulent air flows. The solid particles contain a certain amount of liquid, so call wet-particles. The simulations were performed using commercial ANSYS-FLUENT software. The software is an excellent tool for simulating turbulent flows. However, the software does not have the direct capability of simulating this particular liquid-extraction process. External user defined functions and subroutines (UDFs) were developed and incorporated in the software to conduct the simulation for this particular process. Several design configurations were tested to obtain the best extraction performance. Investigations of the physics of the extraction process in turbulent flows were also conducted using the new “hybrid” software tool.