CFD study of the multiphase flow in classifying hydrocyclone : effect of cone geometry

This paper presents a numerical study of the gas–liquid– solid flow in hydrocyclones by a recently developed continuum-based multiphase flow model. The applicability of the model has been verified by a good agreement between the calculated and measured flow fields and separation efficiency (Kuang et al., 2012), and is used here to study the effect of cone length from a feed solids concentration of 4 to 30% (by volume). The numerical results show that for a standard design of cone section, decreasing cone length leads to the decrease of separation efficiency and the increase of inlet pressure drop for a given feed solids concentration. It is also shown that the performance of the cyclone with a short cone section is very sensitive to feed solids concentration