Evaluations of turbulence models for highly swirling flows in cyclones

Abstract

The aim of this work is to investigate the suitability of various turbulence models and their options for highly complex swirling flows in tangential inlet cyclones. Three-dimensional, steady governing equations for the incompressible, turbulent flow inside the cyclone are solved numerically. The prediction performance of three popular turbulence models and various options available for these models was evaluated by comparing the computed velocity profiles and pressure drop with the experimental data given in the literature. Results obtained from the numerical tests have demonstrated that the swirl factor for the RNG k-epsilon model has considerably influence on the prediction performance of the model. However, the Reynolds stress model shows better agreement with the experimental data than that of the standard k-epsilon and the RNG k-epsilon turbulence models. The effect of wall-reflection term in the RSM model was also investigated and found that inclusion of this term slightly improves the performance of the model.