CFD Analysis of Water Flow Behaviour Inside a Falcon Bowl

Abstract

In mineral processing, techniques like classification; gravity concentration, thickening etc. require extensive understanding on fluid flow characteistics and relative movement of solids in fluids. The complexities in the geometries of the individual operations along with variable feed characteristics and limited computational facilities forced the researchers to optimize the performance through empirical. Though they are very useful in the mineral industry for a long time, better insight on the process physics can be achieved through computational based fluid dynamics modeling, design and simulation. Out standing developments in the computational facilities in the recent past have opened up avenues for process design and simulation through these techniques. The present study is an attempt to simulate the mechanism of water flow inside a rotating Falcon Concentrator bowl using a commercially available CFD package Fluent.