CFD Simulations of Pressure Drop and Velocity Field in a Cyclone Separator with Central Vortex Stabilization Rod

A problem of cyclone separators is the low grade efficiency of small particles. Therefore, a high efficiency cyclone separator has been developed and successfully tested in former work. In this cyclone separator, a vortex stabilizer is used to suppress the vortex core precession. In this article, the pressure and flow field in this cyclone separator are calculated by means of computational fluid dynamics using the commercial software Ansys Fluent 13. The position of the vortex core is tracked in these simulations by searching the position of minimal dynamic pressure and the centre of moment of the horizontal velocity components as function of the axial coordinate. The results are compared with experimental data. It is demonstrated that when using a stabilizer, the vortex is kept in position. Furthermore the maximum of the tangential velocity is found to be larger, which is known to have a positive effect on the separation of small particles in the inner solid body rotation vortex.