Efficient Collision Detection in a Simulated Hydrocyclone

Abstract

Hydrocyclones enhance oil–water separation efficiency compared to conventional separation methods. An efficient collision detection scheme with N_p ln N_p dependency on the number of particles is proposed. The scheme is developed to investigate the importance of particle–particle interaction for flow and particle behavior in dilute oil–water separators. However, the proposed scheme can also be used for efficient multigrid soft collision calculation with long-range particle–particle interaction models. The collision detection scheme is first validated using a case of settling spheres. Subsequently, the scheme is applied to a simplified flow field, similar to the flow fields observed in hydrocyclones.

GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT

Keywords:

• Collision detection
• hydrocyclone
• Lagrangian particle tracking
• numerical algorithm
• oil–water separation