A CFD investigation into the enhancement of down-hole de-oiling hydro cyclone performance

Recently, hydro cyclones have gained a proper reputation in separating multiple phases and considering their versatile performance and valuable features, they are being utilized in plethora of industrial fields including pharmaceutical, chemical, mineral, and petroleum. Of their useful aspects, maintenance-free operation, high durability under severe temperature and intensive pressure, and high separation efficiency can be mentioned. Despite being widely utilized, there are some obstacles that hinders achieving the apex of hydro cyclones’ applicability. Among all the problematic issues, the presence of gas core in de-oiling hydro cyclones, which is formed due to the high turbulent conditions, is of significant concerns. In this article, there has been an attempt to investigate the effects of implementing rods with two different designs, on the performance of de-oiling hydro cyclones to either resolve and improve the abovementioned issues. The results of laboratory model regeneration, demonstrated reasonable agreement with experimental data; in fact, the highest error associated with the regenerated model was discerned to be 14 percent. The outcomes of proposed models authenticated noticeable augmentation in overall functionally of hydro cyclone, flow behavior enhancement, as well as separation efficiency improvement in comparison to the reference model. As such, the required time for the proposed models to meet the stable condition was enhanced about over 90 percent, and the separation efficiency for the oil particle diameter of 17 μm (as the best case) was enriched up to 34.75 and 26.83 percent for model A and model B, in comparison to the regenerated hydro cyclone model. •Ascertaining hydro cyclone separation efficiency enhancement using CFD simulation.•Air core suppression via implementation of full-length, and double vortex finder rods.•Equipped hydro cyclone flow behavior analysis under severe turbulent condition.•Separation efficiency, velocity profiles, turbulent kinetic energy, as well as steady state condition timing are enhanced.