Designing W-shaped apex for improving the separation efficiency of a full-column hydrocyclone

To improve the separation performance of hydrocyclones, a full-column hydrocyclone with a W-shaped apex structure is proposed. According to the height and width of the W structure, the hydrocyclones are divided into nine structures, A-I to C-III. To obtain an optimized underflow structure, a computational fluid dynamics-based numerical simulation is conducted to compare the performance of different hydrocyclone structures. The variations of the pressure field, velocity field, air-core shape, density field, and separation performance were investigated, and the results were compared with classical experimental data to verify the accuracy of the numerical simulations.