Experimental and numerical study of spiral-channels dust separator for separation of black powder of gas pipeline

In this paper, the separation black powder from air flow experimentally have been studied by spiral-channels dust separator and the efficiency and pressure drop of spiral-channels dust separator has been investigated by CFD simulations in different operating conditions. Powder particles have been tested from a sample of powders of Saveh Strengthening Station, whose average particle size has been determined by DLS and SEM images processing, 0.327 micrometers. CFD simulation of spiral-channels dust separator has been done with FLUENT software. The RNG k-ε turbulent model as an optimal turbulence model has been used. The difference between the experimental and the simulation results was revealed around 16% and 7.15% for efficiency and pressure drop parameters respectively. To illustrating the effect of operating condition, the various flow rate and solids mass fraction were investigated and results showed that maximum efficiency is the highest input volumetric flow rate. Also, the results showed that this system has the efficiency of more than 80% for separating Black Powder particles and with increasing 40% of the volumetric flow rate, the separation efficiency increased up to 10%. If, by increasing the mass fraction of solids by 5 times, the efficiency increased only by 3%. The pressure drop of the separator increased up to about 50% with increasing the volumetric flow rate from 80 to 140 m3/hr.