A cyclone separator is a device that separates solid particles from a fluid using centrifugal force and gravity in its inner chamber. Among cyclone separators, the separator that uses water as a working fluid is called as hydrocyclone separator, which has been developed for the purpose of dehydrating solid mixtures with a proportion of solids floating in liquids greater than 1, such as soil, coal, and cement slurry. In this paper, a hydrocyclone was designed based on the previously proposed design method, and how different the performance is from the targeted value was investigated using the computational fluid dynamics.

This research was conducted for dewatered sludge cake of industrial wastewater treatment, i.e., as the object of inorganic sludge discharged especially in iron & steel manufacturing shop which used Air drying system to reduce water content. That drying system's single-type cyclone separator was confirmed to have significantly lower separation efficiency on the conditions 20μm and below of particular size through computational fluid dynamics(CFD) analysis. However, we found out the primarily advanced value of separation efficiency on dual-type directly connected. Regarding separation efficiency on size of 10μm, the efficiency of a single-type was presented at 51.91%. On the other side, the efficiency of the dual-type was 97.88%. This advanced effect of the dual cyclone separator was checked at a demo facility of air drying equipment designed by 340m3/min of airflow on site.

In this study, two types of cyclone separators containing a structure of prevention underflow and a cyclone separator without the structure were analyzed by computational fluid technique. The pressure loss was increased by increasing the inlet velocity from 8m/s to 28m/s, and the velocity and pressure were compared through five cross sections in the vortex finder. Also, the velocity and the pressure contour in the central section were compared. It can be seen that the performance reduction of the cyclone separator by the prevention structure is related to the distance to the vortex finder inlet rather than the effect of the diameter of the structure.