Study on the Separation Performance of a Two Cylindrical Section Hydrocyclone under Various Height Ratios

Abstract

Two cylindrical section hydrocyclones can suppress particle misplacement by regulating the circulation flow, but few researchers have investigated the effect of the cylindrical height ratio. In this paper, numerical simulations and physical tests were conducted to investigate the effect of height ratio on the particle motion behavior and separation performance of the two cylindrical section hydrocyclone. According to the numerical simulation results, with increasing height ratio, the separation cut size decreased, the separation accuracy and recovery rate of medium and coarse particles in the underflow increased, the coarse particle misplacement in overflow decreased significantly, and the proportion of medium particle circulation flow gradually increased. According to the test results, the number of misplaced fine particles in underflow could be effectively reduced when H 1 /H 0 = 0.30. With increasing height ratio, the number of misplaced coarse particles in the overflow decreased and the classification efficiency of fine particles increased. The maximum separation efficiencies of medium and coarse particles could be obtained at H 1 /H 0 values of 0.47 and 0.17, respectively. Therefore, increasing the height ratio could inhibit coarse particle misplacement in overflow and improve the separation performance of two cylindrical section hydrocyclones.