Avaliação numérica da eficiência de separação de ciclones

Abstract

Understanding the behavior of turbulent flows is of fundamental importance with regard to designing projects and optimizing industrial equipment with complex flows. In view of this, industrial cyclonic separators have great prominence in the separation of solid particles immersed in a fluid medium. The following areas stand out as the main application sectors of the separator: chemical engineering, environmental, ecological protection, food processing, minerals and metallurgy. With this in mind, the present work aimed to study the influence of the diameter of the overflow, underflow, height of the conical and cylindrical section and voxtex finder in an industrial cyclonic separator on the efficiency of cyclonic separation. Therefore, a central composite planning (CCP) was used as a simulation strategy, obtaining 27 simulations, which were discretized using an Eulerian approach through OpenFoam as numerical solver. Analyzing the configurations individually, it was observed that the diameter of the overflow, underflow, height of the cylindrical section, conic and vortex finder were significant in predicting the separation efficiency, the latter being the only one that is not significant in the analysis of the velocity and drop profile depression. When evaluating the PCC, a quadratic correlation coefficient of 0.9228 was obtained for the pressure drop, this model being adequate for its prediction, however of 0.5665 for the separation efficiency, showing that there are significant geometric characteristics not studied in predicting separation efficiency.