Studying the effect of Cyclone’s dimensions on the separation efficiency of wheat using computational fluid dynamics method

Abstract

Cyclone is one of the most important components of pneumatic conveying system which is used for separating particles from gas stream. A CFD study was conducted to investigate the effect of Cyclone’s dimensions on its efficiency during wheat separation process. The main aim was alignment of the particles from different parts of the input and understanding the movement and separation of wheat particles. Cyclone type was high efficiency Stair and. It was designed in Solid works 2010 and meshed using Gambit software. In Fluent software based on a comparison with experimental results, the second order Reynolds stress model (RSM) was selected as the most appropriate method to model cyclone separation performance. It was found that at ratio of De/D=0.45 resulted high collection efficiency for particle size less than 4mm. In general at high 0.5 the separation efficiency for small seeds (d<4mm) was significantly less in comparison with the other ratios. Results showed that for wheat grains with approximate size of 3 mm and more, the ratio of h/d= 0.75 was the most appropriate option. However, for seeds size less than 3 mm h/d=0.5 was more appropriate. Considering the numerical results of this study, it was found that the smaller outlet diameter cyclone has a high collecting efficiency in comparison with large diameter cyclones.