Centrifugal separation of air, water, oil and mercury

OpenFOAM 4.x

Case directory

$FOAM_TUTORIALS/multiphase/reactingMultiphaseEulerFoam/laminar/mixerVessel2D

Summary

We calculate centrifugal separation of a fluid that is equally mixed with air, water, oil, and mercury using MRF function. The region "rotor" rotates at 10.472 rad/s on the Z-axis, and the calculation is performed as a two-dimensional problem with one mesh in the Z direction.

Model geometry Model geometry

The physical properties and interactions of each phase are defined in the files "constant/thermophysicalProperties.*" and "constant/phaseProperties", respectively.

The rotation axis and the rotation speed are defined in the file "constant/MRFProperties" as follows.

MRF1
{
    cellZone    rotor;
    active      yes;

    nonRotatingPatches ();

    origin    (0 0 0);
    axis      (0 0 1);
    omega     constant 10.472;
}

The rotation area is defined as the cell zone "rotor" as shown in the figure below (white part).

Cell zone rotor Cell zone "rotor"

The meshes are as follows, and the number of mesh is 3072.

Mesh Meshes

The calculation result is as follows.

Volume ratio of air at final time (alpha.air) Volume ratio of air at final time (alpha.air)
Volume ratio of oil at final time (alpha.oil) Volume ratio of oil at final time (alpha.oil)
Volume ratio of water at final time (alpha.water) Volume ratio of water at final time (alpha.water)
Volume ratio of mercury at final time (alpha.mercury) Volume ratio of mercury at final time (alpha.mercury)

We can see that the layers are created from the center to outer in the order of decreasing density.

Commands

cp -r $FOAM_TUTORIALS/multiphase/multiphase/reactingMultiphaseEulerFoam/laminar/mixerVessel2D mixerVessel2D
cd mixerVessel2D

m4 < system/blockMeshDict.m4 > system/blockMeshDict
blockMesh
topoSet
setsToZones -noFlipMap

reactingMultiphaseEulerFoam

paraFoam

Calculation time

1 hours 13 minutes 59.65 seconds *Single, Inter(R) Core(TM) i7-2600 CPU @ 3.40GHz 3.40GHz