This article describes a CFD engineering application developed to investigate numerically the multiphase, non-isothermal, turbulent flow physics within the suspension preheater of a dry-process rotary cement kiln. The multi–stage cyclone preheater is a counter-current heat exchanger.
We used the CFD flow solver ANSYS-Fluent R18.1. to accomplish this task. The hybrid Eulerian multiphase-dense discrete phase model is a coupled Eulerian-Lagrangian technique. The primary carrier-phase is treated as a continuum by solving the Navier-Stokes equations, while the secondary discrete dispersed-phase is solved by tracking the particle parcels through the calculated flow field. The multiphase turbulence of the carrier-phase is modeled using the Reynolds stress transport model. The dispersed-phase interactions are modeled through the specific collisions models provided by the kinetic theory of granular flow and/or discrete element method. The Eulerian multiphase-DDPM method provided a quiet stable solution for a medium/high mass loading (solid to gas mass ratio 0.89:1).
The four-stage cyclone suspension preheater is analyzed for its operating performance i.e. overall pressure drop and global collection efficiency of cyclone stages, calcination degree at bottom cyclone stage, flue gas temperature at 1st. cyclone stage and availability to get more insight of very complex multi-phase flow patterns within this equipment. The set of industrial measurements, collected during a heat and mass balance of a dry process rotary cement kiln, were used to verify and to validate part of the simulation results.