Numerical Methods for Simulating Separation in a Vacuum Cleaner Cyclone

Abstract: This thesis includes a numerical comparison of different turbulence models and particle models in terms of convergence time and physical accuracy. A cyclone is used as the computational domain. Cyclones are common devices for separating two or more substances. The work is divided into an experimental part and a numerical part. In the experiments, characteristics of the cyclone were measured. This data is then used to evaluate different numerical modeling approaches. The numerical part consists of two parts, namely single phase flow and multiphase flow, where different modeling aspects are examined and presented. Furthermore, important parameters that characterize a cyclone, such as pressure drop and separation efficiency, are calculated. The separation efficiency, i.e. how much dust that actually goes to the dust bin, is calculated for two different types of dust. The software used for the numerical simulations has been Star-CCM+.