A PRAGMATIC PROCEDURE TO DEFINE THE CFD MULTIPHASE STRATEGY OF HYDROCYCLONES

The present study aimed at proposing a practical method for preliminarily assessing a hydrocyclone separation problem and define a suitable multiphase approach for the CFD simulation. From inlet stream properties, multiphase parameters can be obtained and used to estimate the phase coupling level of the analyzed scenario. Two simulations works were taken from the literature employing the full Euler-Euler and the simplified mixture models for reproducing the partition curve of a benchmark hydrocyclone processing a water+limestone suspension, and, for a determined coupling extent of around 10%, the first treatment retrieved a more accurate prediction, reflecting the large capture of polydispersity effects achieved.