Effects of Cyclone Vortex Finder and Inlet Angle on Solid Separation Using CFD Simulation

Abstract

© 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Renewable energy is energy that is collected from renewable resources such as sunlight, wind, rain, tides, waves, geothermal heat and biomass. Biomass is alternative fuel which can be combusted to obtain electricity in various industries. Inorganic compound commonly found in ash is associated with the product gas after the combustion. The device that is widely used to separate the ash out of product gas is cyclone due to the simple construction, low maintenance cost and high reliability which making use of centrifugal force. Since conventional cyclone separators cannot separate solid particles with a high performance, the separation of particles in different novel cyclone shapes have been investigated in this study via three dimensions computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The computational meshes with high resolution of approximately 170,000-190,000 cells and (RNG) k- ϵ model are used for flow analysis of the cyclones. The simulation results have been accurately compared with the experimental results from Azadi et al. [1]. Then, the parameters in consideration are the diameter of gas outlet (vortex finder) and the angle of inlet with the inlet velocity of 15 m/s and solid volume fraction of 6×105.