Anisotropic Flow: Cyclone Separator
The flow inside a cyclone separator is characterised by strong swirling motion and three-dimensional boundary layers. Properly accounting for these effects is a challenging problem for CFD simulations. This tutorial presents the initial step in setting up a coarse mesh cyclone flow simulation.
In this tutorial, you first import the 3D-CAD model of the cyclone separator. You can follow the steps in the 3D-CAD: Cyclone Separator tutorial to create the geometry. The tutorial then illustrates how to set up the mesh settings, physics models, and boundary conditions.
The flow domain of the cyclone separator is meshed using the surface remesher, polyhedral mesher, and the prism layer mesher. The polyhedral mesher is used to handle the recirculating flows inside the model.
The K-Omega turbulence model is used for this simulation due to the strong swirling flow inside the cyclone separator. To achieve convergence, the case is first run in steady state without curvature correction, and then run as unsteady for 0.5 s with curvature correction activated.