Effect of the Inlet Angle on Separation Performance of a Gas–Solid Cyclone Using CFD–DPM

Abstract In this paper, the computational fluid dynamics–DPM method is used to simulate the gas–solid two‐phase flow in cyclone separation, and the Reynolds stress turbulence model is applied to gas turbulence. The distributions of gas velocity, pressure drop, and particle flow characteristics pattern in the cyclone at different inlet angles are obtained. The simulation results show that the tangential velocity increases first and then decreases with the inlet angle from negative to positive, whereas both axial velocity and radial velocity increase with the increase of the inlet angle; in turn, the pressure drop in the cyclone decreases accordingly, and the negative inlet angle brings less pressure drop than the positive inlet angle. Meanwhile, the separation efficiency increases with the increase in particle size. More specifically, small‐sized particles are not easy to be separated, medium‐sized particles need a suitable inlet angle to be well separated, whereas large particles have a wider choice of inlet angles.