Proceedings of The Sixth (2005) ISOPE Ocean Mining Symposium Changsha, Hunan, China, October 913, 2005 Copyright

2005 by The International Society of Offshore and Polar Engineers ISBN 1-880653-656

Design of Hydrocyclone for Solid Separation

Yong-Chan Park, Chi-Ho Yoon, Dong-Kil Lee and Seok-Ki Kwon
Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources Daejeon, Korea

ABSTRACT
Manganese nodules are very fragile and easy to be broken to small pieces even to m or mm size. This can cause environmental problems in the process of a sea test or a commercial mining. For the efficient solid separation from the mixture of sea water and ultrafine particles, we have designed and manufactured a hydrocyclone by a CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) analysis and have performed a short experiment. Eulerian multi-phase method was used to describe the settling behaviors of solids in the hydrocyclone. From the CFD results, it was predicted that the solid recovery was 79%, which agreed with the preliminary experiment.

KEY WORDS: hydrocyclone, two-phase flow, manganese nodules,

experiment

INTRODUCTION
For the recovery of useful minerals and the prevention of contamination, appropriate solid/liquid separation processes are needed from the lifted slurry (Yoon et al., 2004). In a sea test in Korea scheduled in the near future, solid-liquid mixture more than 150 tons per hour should be processed continuously and also the purified seawater should be returned to the sea. Because the release of sea water even with small amount of particles can cause environmental problems, a rapid and highly efficient separation method is required to separate solid particles from the sea water. Hydrocyclone, as in Fig. 1, is the device that is widely used for the separation of materials normally in the form of solid particles (Wang et al., 1999; Yang et al., 2004; Zhao and Jiang, 2005). The device can offers effective solid removal in a compact package comparing with other methods. The suspended solids are separated from the liquid due to the centrifugal force induced inside the hydrocyclone (Fig. 2). The bigger and heavier particles flows out along with the hydrocyclone wall towards the underflow pipe, while the smaller and lighter ones change their directions upwards when they approach the cone apex and flow out through the vortex finder(Nowakowski et al., 2004). It has been used in many fields like dewatering of oil or gas and medicine liquid extraction from organic materials as well as liquid separation from solid materials (Cullivan et al., 2004;Yang et al., 2004).

There are two types of method to design an optimum hydrocylone (Slack et al., 2004). The first type is based on established empirical rules for specific materials handling. Although this may be adequate for conventional cyclone applications, it does not cater for unusual cyclone geometries or processes. The alternative is to use a CFD (computational fluid dynamics) model. This is a numerical solver for non-linear fluid flow equations and the hydrocyclone is actually a challenging flow problem although the structure is simple. CFD has been used effectively in many areas, but computational fluid modeling of the complex multi-phase flow in a hydrocyclone is not a trivial task. Most practical CFD modeling of cyclones has been limited to single phase flow calculations, so the separation efficiency is normally predicted using a Lagrangian particle tracking approach. However, hydrocyclone operates with solid volume fractions in excess of 10%. When high solid volume fractions occur, the Lagrangian approach is not suitable. Therefore, for the modeling of the multi-phase flow, Eulerian approach was chosen in this study. The approach of explicit droplet integration of Lagrangian suffers when scaling to large threedimensional flow situations. For this reason development in the past years has begun to focus on Eulerian schemes for simulating solidliquid two-phase flow (Gerber and Kermani, 2004).
Overflow (Do)

Feed Entrance (Di)

Body length (H)

Underflow Discharge (Du)

Fig. 1. Schematic diagram of the hydrocyclone.

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