Trainee at Fincantieri, Politecnico di Bari
Davide Laricchia received his Master Degree in Mechanical Engineering in 2013 at Politecnico di Bari. He's currently doing an internship at Fincantieri Spa and his research focuses on renewable energies and cyclone separators for purification of natural gas.
Speeches
Authors: Riccardo Amirante, Davide Laricchia, Paolo Tamburrano
Cyclone separators have two important performance parameters, the pressure drop and the collection efficiency. In recent years, several design methods have been presented but most of them only work in certain circumstances. The purpose of this paper is to present a valid methodology able to find the best design and to reduce the pressure drop between inlet and outlet of this device. Initially, a full 3D model of the flow within the cyclone has been developed by means of the commercial code named ANSYS FLUENT 14.5, with the aim of accurately predict fluid dynamic solution and so the pressure drop of the cyclone.
The reliability of this model has been demonstrated first by the excellent correspondence between the numerical pressure drop and the one coming from experimental test and, after that, by the comparison of the flow within the device with previous research. Subsequently, the theoretical analysis of the flow within the
cyclone allowed to establish the geometrical parameters object of optimization, and considering the pressure drop between inlet and outlet as the objective function and the centrifugal force in an internal reference section of the device as a bond. Finally, by means of modeFRONTIER code, the parametric Computational
Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis of the flow within the device has been coupled with a genetic algorithm (MOGA II) to minimize the pressure drop and to keep costant the centrifugal force in the reference section.
The optimized geometry shows a significant pressure drop reduction without modifying the cyclone performance in terms of collection efficiency.
