Minerals Engineering 56 (2014) 91–101

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Minerals Engineering
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/mineng

Prediction of wear and its effect on the multiphase flow and separation
performance of dense medium cyclone
K.W. Chu a,⇑, S.B. Kuang a, A.B. Yu a, A. Vince b, G.D. Barnett c, P.J. Barnett c
a
Laborotory for Simulation and Modelling of Particulate Systems, School of Materials Science and Engineering, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia
b
Elsa Consulting Group Pty Ltd., PO Box 8100, Mt Pleasant, QLD 4740, Australia
c
Minco Tech Australia Pty Ltd., PO Box 142, Cardiff, NSW 2285, Australia

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Dense medium cyclone (DMC) is a high-tonnage device that is widely used to upgrade run-of-mine coal
Received 31 July 2013 in modern coal preparation plants. It is known that wear is one of the problems in the operation of DMCs,
Accepted 29 October 2013 but it is not well understood. In this work, the wear rate of DMC walls due to the impact of coal particles
Available online 28 November 2013
is predicted by a combined computational fluid dynamics and discrete element method (CFD-DEM)
approach, using the Finnie wear model from the literature. In the CFD-DEM model, DEM is used to model
Keywords: the motion of discrete coal particles by applying Newton’s laws of motion and CFD is used to model the
Dense medium cyclone
motion of the slurry medium by numerically solving the local-averaged Navier–Stokes equations
Multiphase flow
Computational fluid dynamics
together with the volume of fluid (VOF) and mixture multiphase flow models. According to the Finnie
Discrete element method wear model, the wear rate is calculated according to the impact angle of particles on the wall, particle
Wear velocity during an impact and the yield stress of wall material; the relevant particle-scale information
can be readily obtained from the CFD-DEM simulation. The numerical results show that the severe wear
locations are generally the inside wall of the spigot and the outside wall of the vortex finder. The wear
rate depends on both the operational conditions and solids properties. It increases generally with the
decrease of medium-to-coal (M:C) ratio. For a given constant M:C ratio, the wear rate for thermal coal
is higher than that for coking coal, especially at the spigot. Large particles may cause a non-symmetric
wear rate due to the gravity effect. The effect of a worn spigot wall on the multiphase flow and separation
performance is also studied. This work suggests that the proposed approach could be a useful tool to
study the effect of wear in DMCs under different conditions.
Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
Dense medium cyclone (DMC) is a high-tonnage device that has
been widely used to upgrade run-of-mine coal in the modern coal
industry by separating gangue from product coal. It is also used in a
variety of mineral plants treating iron ore, dolomite, diamonds,
potash and lead–zinc ores. In this work, DMC refers to that used
in the coal industry. The density of valuable coal particles is gener-
ally smaller than 1500 kg/m3 while that of rejects or gangue parti-
cles larger than 1500 kg/m3. Therefore, a fluid of density of about
1500 kg/m3 is needed for effective separation. This is usually
achieved by use of a mixture of water and fine magnetite particles,
and the mixture is called the ‘‘medium’’ in practice. Thus, multiple
phases are involved in DMC operation, including air, water, coal
and magnetic/nonmagnetic particles of different sizes, densities
and other properties.
⇑ Corresponding author. Tel.: +61 2 93855115; fax: +61 2 93855956.
E-mail address: kaiwei.chu@unsw.edu.au (K.W. Chu).
The general working principle of DMC has been well docu-
mented in the literature (King and Juckes, 1984; Svarovsky,
1984; Wills, 1992; Chu et al., 2009a). As schematically shown in
Fig. 1(a), the feed, which is a mixture of raw coal and magnetite
particles carried by water, enters tangentially near the top of the
cylindrical section, forming a strong swirling flow. Centrifugal ef-
fect causes the refuse or high ash particles to move towards the
wall, where the axial velocity points predominantly downward,
and to discharge through the spigot. The lighter clean coal parti-
cles, driven by the pressure gradient force (PGF) and radial fluid
drag force (overcoming the centrifugal effect), move towards the
longitudinal axis of the DMC, where there is usually an air core,
and the predominant axial velocity points upward and the coal ex-
its through the vortex finder.
Despite of the extensive work on DMCs in the past (Scott, 1990;
Wood, 1990; Restarick and Krnic, 1991; Galvin and Smitham,
1994; He and Laskowski, 1994; Ferrara et al., 2000; Hu et al.,
2001; Subramanian, 2002; Sripriya et al., 2007; Magwai and Bos-
man, 2008), there are still a lot of problems with the operation of
DMCs. Typical problems are the so-called ‘‘surging’’ phenomenon

0892-6875/$ - see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.mineng.2013.10.029
92 K.W. Chu et al. / Minerals Engineering 56 (2014) 91–101

Nomenclature

c damping coefficient, dimensionless Vs sample volume, m3

d particle diameter, m Vcell volume of a computational cell, m3
Dc cyclone diameter, m
E Young’s modulus, Pa Greek letters
Ep Ecart probable, relative density (RD) a the angle to represent the change of the spigot wall duo
fc contact force, N to wear, degree
fd damping force, N b empirical coefficient defined in Table 2, dimensionless
fp–f particle–fluid interaction force, N d vector of the particle-particle or particle-wall overlap, m
Fp–f interaction forces between fluid and solids phases in a d magnitude of d, m
computational cell, N e porosity, dimensionless
g gravity acceleration vector, 9.81 m/s2 / parameter
G gravity vector, N k shape parameter for particle size distribution, dimen-
H operational head, dimensionless sionless
I moment of inertia of a particle, kgm l fluid viscosity, kg/m/s
kcell number of particles in a computational cell, dimension- lr coefficient of rolling friction, m
less ls coefficient of sliding friction, dimensionless
ki number of particles in contact with particle i, dimen- m Poisson’s ratio, dimensionless
sionless q density, kg/m3
km number of collisions in a sampling time interval, dimen- s viscous stress tensor, N/m3
sionless x angular velocity, rad/s
m mass, kg x magnitude of angular velocity, rad/s
n sample times, dimensionless x
^ unit angular velocity
n unit vector in the normal direction of two contact
spheres, dimensionless Subscripts
Np the total number of particles residing in the DMC c contact or cyclone
p yield stress, MPa
cell computational CFD cell
P pressure, Pa d damping
DP pressure drop, Pa D drag
Q removed wall volume, m3
f fluid phase
R radius vector (from particle centre to a contact point), m ij between particle i and j
R magnitude of R, m i(j) corresponding to i(j)th particle
Re Reynolds number, dimensionless m medium phase
S sampling area, m2
max maximum
t time, s n in normal direction
T total sampling time, s p particle phase
T driving frictional torque, N m pg pressure gradient
u mean fluid velocity vector, m/s
p–f between particle and fluid
u0 fluctuating fluid velocity vector, m/s s sample
V volume, m3 t in tangential direction
v particle velocity vector, m/s

(Wood, 1990), vortex finder overloading (Hu et al., 2001), severe
wearing of DMC walls (Zughbi et al., 1991) and difficulties in
scale-up and system instability. Among them, excess wearing is a
serious problem but it is not yet well understood. In practice, the
lining of a DMC has to be replaced sometimes quite frequently
due to wearing. For example, for the DMC used to collect diamond
bearing lamproite ore, it is reported that the rate of wear of the
vortex finder determines the operation life of the cyclone where
98% of the feed to the cyclone reports to the floats through the vor-
tex finder (Zughbi et al., 1991). Therefore, it is important to predict
the wear rate of the walls since the wearing would change the DMC
geometry and thus affect separation performance. Moreover, it is
also important to locate the most severe wearing locations in a
DMC for possible special treatments.
The wear in a DMC is essentially the wearing of particle abra-
sion on solid surfaces, which is common in industrial processes
and various machinery, some examples being sand blasting, pneu-
matic pipelines, and damage to helicopter propellers and turbine
blades. In these cases, the target surface is attacked by solid parti-
cles entrained by a fluid stream. In general, the extent of the sur-
face erosion by impingement of abrasive particles depends on
factors such as particle impact velocity, impact angle, properties
of the impacting particles and properties of target material (Fan
et al., 1991). These concepts have been the foundation for most
of the wear models including Finnie’s wear model (1960) which
has been widely used in many industrial processes (Chen et al.,
1998; Bhasker, 2010; Lester et al., 2010). By far the majority of ero-
sion models have been developed based on the Finnie model or its
modifications.
The modelling of wearing in a DMC is quite limited in the liter-
ature. The only work found was done by Zughbi et al. (1991) who
used a two-dimensional (2D) computational fluid dynamics (CFD)
model to predict the wear rate in a DMC used in diamond mines.
Essentially, the modelling of wear in a DMC largely depends on
the modelling of the dynamic process of particle–wall interaction,
which can be readily obtained by the so-called discrete element
method (DEM) in which the motion of particles is modelled as a
discrete phase, described by Newton’s laws of motion (Cundall
and Strack, 1979). For pure particle flow systems, DEM has been
successfully used to predict wear due to the impaction of particles
in mills (Cleary, 1998; Jayasundara et al., 2011). For particle–fluid
systems, the so-called CFD-DEM (Tsuji et al., 1992; Xu and Yu,
1997) has been used to model the flow but not for the prediction
of wear. In the CFD-DEM model, the flow of fluid is treated as a
 K.W. Chu et al. / Minerals Engineering 56 (2014) 91–101
Fig. 1. Schematic (a), geometry (b) and mesh (c) representation of the simulated DMC (Dc = 1000 mm).
continuous phase, described by the local averaged Navier–Stokes
equations on a computational cell scale, and the particle flow by
DEM. The approach has been recognised as an effective method
to study the fundamentals of particle–fluid flow by various inves-
tigators, as reviewed by Zhu et al. (2007, 2008). Recently, a CFD-
DEM model has been developed to study the multiphase flow in
DMCs (Chu et al., 2009a, 2009b, 2012). In this work, the wear rate
of the DMC walls is predicted under various conditions using a
CFD-DEM method coupled with the Finnie wear model (1960),
and the effect of a worn spigot wall is studied.
2. Simulation approach
2.1. CFD-DEM model
The principles of CFD-DEM have been well established (Tsuji
et al., 1992; Xu and Yu, 1997; Zhou et al., 2010). For complicated
flow systems, the code development for the solution of fluid phase
could be very time-consuming. In the past, some attempts have
been done to extend the capability of CFD-DEM model from simple
to complicated systems. Particularly, taking the advantages of the
available CFD development, a CFD-DEM model has been extended
by Chu and Yu (2008a) with ANSYS Fluent as a platform, achieved
by incorporating a DEM code and a coupling scheme between DEM
and CFD into ANSYS Fluent through its User Defined Functions
(UDFs). The applicability of this development has been demon-
strated in the study of the particle–fluid flow in different flow sys-
tems including pneumatic conveying bend (Chu and Yu, 2008b),
gas cyclone (Chu et al., 2011), circulating fluidized bed (Chu and
Yu, 2008a) and dense medium cyclone (Chu et al., 2009a, 2009b,
2012). This approach is also used in this work. For completeness,
only a brief description of the model is given below.
Recognising that the flow in a DMC is quite complicated, the
modelling was divided into three steps, as shown in Fig. 2. The first
two steps are devoted to solving the medium slurry flow and the
third step is the particle flow. The continuum medium flow is
93
calculated from the continuity and the Navier–Stokes equations
based on the local mean variables defined over a computational
cell. These are given by
@ðqf eÞ
þ r  ðqf euÞ ¼ 0 ð1Þ
@t
and
@ðqf euÞ
þ r  ðqf eu  uÞ ¼ rP  Ff —p þ r  ðesÞ þ qf eg
@t
þ r  ðqf u0  u0 Þ ð2Þ
0
where e, u, u , t, qf, P, Ff–p, s, and g are, respectively, porosity, mean
and fluctuating fluid velocities, time, fluid density, static pressure,
volumetric fluid-particle interaction force, fluid viscous stress ten-
Pkc
sor, and acceleration due to gravity. Ff p ¼ V 1 i¼1 f p—f ;i , where fp–f,-
cell
i is the total fluid force on particle i and kc is the number of particles
in a CFD cell of volume Vcell. qu0 u0 is the Reynolds stress term due
to turbulence and modelled by the Reynolds Stress Model (RSM)
provided in ANSYS Fluent 6.2, while turbulence modification due
to the presence of particles is not considered in this work.
The flow patterns derived by solving Eqs. (1) and (2) represent
the mixture flow of medium and air. According to the work of
Wang et al. (2007, 2009b), the CFD modelling of medium and air
flow was divided into two steps, as shown in Fig. 2. In step 1, only
air and slurry are considered. The turbulence is modelled using the
RSM, and the Volume of Fluid (VOF) model is used to describe the
interface between the medium and the air core. In VOF, the two
phases are considered immiscible and modelled by solving a single
set of momentum equations and tracking the volume fraction of
each of the fluids throughout the domain. The viscosity and density
are the volume fraction weighted sum of the slurry and air values.
At this stage, the position of the air core and the initial velocity dis-
tribution is obtained. The method is similar to that used for mod-
elling multiphase flow in hydrocyclones (Wang et al., 2007). In step
2, six additional phases are introduced to describe the behaviour of
magnetite particles with different sizes. The multiphase model is
94 K.W. Chu et al. / Minerals Engineering 56 (2014) 91–101

Fig. 2. Schematic diagram of the modelling approach.

changed from the VOF to the mixture model where air phase is Table 1
treated as one of the secondary phases. A model is also introduced Equations used to calculate forces and torques acting on a particle (Chu et al., 2012).

to account for viscosity variation as a function of the volume frac- Forces and torques Symbols Equations
tion of magnetite particle (Ishii and Mishima, 1984). Detailed den- Normal forces
sity and velocity distributions of different phases are obtained at pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi 3=2
Contact fcn,ij E
 3ð1 m2 Þ 2R dn n
the end of this step. The details of the calculation of medium flow Damping fdn,ij  pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi 1=2
can be found elsewhere (Wang et al., 2007, 2009b). cn pffiffi3mi E 2 2ð1m Þ
R  dn v n;ij
In the third step, as shown in Fig. 2, the flow of coal particles are Tangential forces
  3=2 
determined from the fluid flow patterns obtained above using Contact fct,ij

ls f cn;ij
1 1
minfjdt j;dt;max g
dt
jdt j dt;max
either the Lagrangian Particle Tracking (LPT) or the DEM method. 
Damping fdt,ij pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi1=2
In this work, DEM is used. Thus a particle in a fluid has two types ct 6mi ls f cn;ij
1dt =dt;max
v t;ij
dt;max
of motion: translational and rotational, both obeying Newton’s sec-
ond law of motion. During its movement, the particle may collide Torque
Friction Tij Ri  ðf ct;ij þ f dt;ij Þ
with its neighbouring particles or with the wall and interact with
Rolling Mij lr di f cn;ij x
^i
the surrounding fluid, through which momentum is exchanged.
At any time t, the equations governing the translational and rota- Body force
Gravity Gi mi g
tional motions of particle i in this multi-phase flow system are:
Particle–fluid interaction force
Viscous drag force fd,i  2
k qf jui v i jðui vi Þ pd2i b
dv i X i 4:8
0:63 þ Re 0:5 2 4 ei
mi ¼ f p—f ;i þ mi g þ ðf c;ij þ f d;ij Þ ð3Þ p;i

dt j¼1
Pressure gradient force fpg,i Vp,irP
where: 1
R
¼ R1i þ R1j , n ¼ RRii , v ij ¼ v j  v i þ xj  Rj  xi  Ri ;
and v n;ij ðv ij  nÞ  n, v t;ij ¼ ðv ij  nÞ, x^ i ¼ xx , Rep;i ¼ d q elju v j,
i
i
i f i
f
i i

 2
 Pkcell
ð1:5log Rep;i Þ Vi
k b ¼ 3:7  0:65 exp  , e¼1 i1

dxi X i 2 DV cell
Ii ¼ ðTc;ij þ Tr;ij Þ ð4Þ
dt j¼1

where fp–f,i is the total particle–fluid interaction forces, which is the

sum of various particle–fluid forces including viscous drag force and
PGF in the current case. Trial simulations indicate that other parti-
cle–fluid forces, such as the virtual mass force and the lift force, can
be ignored. The fluid properties used to calculate the particle–fluid
interaction forces are those relating to the properties of the mixture
phase which are calculated from the individual phases, i.e., water,
air and magnetite particles of different sizes by the mixture model.
For simplicity, the lubrication effect on particle–particle interaction
and particle dispersion due to turbulence is not considered. The
details of the calculation of the forces in Eqs. (1)-(4) are shown in
Table 1. They have been used in many previous studies, as summa-
rised by Zhu et al. (2007,2008).
CFD and DEM two-way coupling (the fluid forces acting on par-
ticles and the reaction forces of particles on the fluid) is numeri-
cally achieved as follows. At each time step, DEM provides
information, such as the positions and velocities of individual par-
ticles, for the evaluation of porosity and volumetric particle–fluid
interaction force in a computational cell. CFD then uses these data
to determine the fluid flow field, from which the particle–fluid
interaction forces acting on individual particles are determined.
Incorporation of the resulting forces into DEM produces informa-
tion about the motion of individual particles for the next time step
(Xu and Yu, 1997).
2.2. Wear model
General speaking, wall wear due to impacts of particles depends
on the properties of the wall materials and the details of particle–
wall interaction. Wall materials can be generally divided into two
types according to the relationship between wear rate and impact
angle: ductile and brittle (Hutchings, 1992; Al-Bukhaiti et al.,
2007). However, it is also reported that under certain conditions
there are ductile–brittle transitions, where a brittle material has
a wear rate of ductile material (Hutchings, 1992). The transition
happens especially when particle size is small and the momentum
of particles is not big enough to initiate the fracture of brittle mate-
rial (Finnie, 1995). In a DMC, the wear rate of the walls may be
treated as that of ductile materials since coal particles are too soft
to generate fracture of the wall material. The ‘‘groove’’ wear pat-
tern of DMC walls instead of wall fracture observed in practice jus-
tifies this argument. On the other hand, it should be pointed out
that until now there is no general wear model for brittle materials
because of the difficulty in describing material fracture. Therefore,
the wear model used in the present work is the Finnie wear model
(1960) which is suitable for the prediction of wear of ductile mate-
rials and involves the use of concepts such as the kinetic energy
and the angle of impact. The model has been developed based on
 K.W. Chu et al. / Minerals Engineering 56 (2014) 91–101
Fig. 3. Abrasive grain striking a surface and removing material (Finnie, 1960).
a single rigid abrasive particle striking a target surface in such a
way as to displace or cut away part of the surface. Removal of
material is somewhat similar to the tooth of a milling cutter or
the grains on a grinding wheel. Fig. 3 shows a rigid particle with
velocity v striking a surface at an angle a and removing some
material. The volume of material Q, removed by a single abrasive
grain of mass m and velocity v is given by:
8 the effect of coal type. In this work, the only difference between
< mv 2 ½sin 2a  3 sin2 a a 6 18:5o
8p
Q¼ ð5Þ
: mv 2 cos2 a a P 18:5o
24p
where p is the yield stress of the target material. In this work we as-
sume that the wall lining is made of white cast iron which has the
yield stress of 720 MPa and the following assumptions have been
made:
 The critical angle used in Eq. (5) is still 18.5° even though this
angle will vary with different systems.
 The abrasive properties of both coal particles and rejects are
assumed to be the same and are close to that of silicon carbide
grains. This may overestimate the DMC wear rate especially at
the vortex finder wall where the erosion is mainly caused by
soft coal particles.
 It is assumed that the presence of water will not affect wear rate
as long as the impact velocity and angle are determined.
 The wear by the flow of the medium (mixture of water and fine
magnetite) is ignored.
 The wear is estimated with the possible change of wall profile
ignored during the simulation.
From the DEM simulation, when a particle is in contact with a
wall, information such as particle–wall impact velocity, impact an-
gle, and their location can be obtained and thus the volume of
material removed during an impact can be calculated according
to Eq. (5). The DMC walls are divided into thousands of small sam-
pling walls. In each sampling wall, the volume of material removed
is accumulated. Then the wear rate of that sampling wall is the
accumulated total volume of removed wall material divided by
the surface area of the sampling wall and sampling time.
In practice, it takes months before walls wear out and need to
be replaced. It is impossible for CFD-DEM models to simulate the
whole wearing process over such a long time. Instead, the present
study adopts the following procedure to model the wear process.
At macroscopically steady flow state (defined as the state at which
the flow characteristics only fluctuate with time), the wear rate on
different sampling walls is recorded for 30 s. Then it is assumed
that the wear rate is constant with time or the wear amount in-
creases with time linearly. This enables us to calculate the wear
over a month or year according to the wear rate of 30 s.
3. Simulation conditions
The DMC considered in this work is, for convenience, similar to
that used in the previous experimental (Rong, 2007) and numerical
(Chu et al., 2009b) studies. The geometric parameters and mesh
representation of the DMC are shown in Fig. 1(b) and (c). The
DMC has a square and involute inlet. It is divided into 80,318 hexa-
hedral cells for the CFD computation, with trial numerical results
95
indicating that a greater number does not change the solution
much. The DMC is operated at an orientation angle of 10°. The
pressure at the two outlets (vortex finder and spigot) is one atmo-
sphere (101.325 kPa). For simplicity, all coal particles are assumed
to be spherical.
In total 9 simulations are carried out for different M:C ratio,
coal type and spigot geometry, as shown in Tables 2 and 3. Ta-
ble 2 summarizes the operational conditions used in the simula-
tions while Table 3 highlights the differences between different
runs. It can be seen that the simulations are mainly focused on
thermal coal, with coking coal used in runs 1–3 and thermal coal
in runs 4–9. The reason is that thermal coal may lead to severe
spigot wear that would affect the DMC performance significantly.
The effect of M:C ratio on wear rate is first investigated for cok-
ing coal (runs 1–3). Then thermal coal is used in run 4 to study
coking coal and thermal coal is the particle density distribution
that is shown in Fig. 4. The effect of particle size is also investi-
gated in runs 4 and 5, where the gravity effect on the wear pro-
file is also examined. Finally runs 6–9 are carried out to study the
effect of the change of DMC geometry due to wearing on DMC
flow and performance.
In this work, only simplified changes of DMC geometry due to
wearing are considered, as shown in Fig. 5. Fig. 5(a) shows that
the severe wear locations are the inner spigot and outer vortex fin-
der walls. According to a previous study (Wang et al., 2009a), the
wear of the outer vortex finder wall would not affect the DMC per-
formance much since it does not change the inner diameter of the
vortex finder, although it would be a serious problem if the whole
vortex finder wall were worn out completely. It is reported that the
variation of the diameter of the spigot inner wall would affect the
DMC performance significantly (Wang et al., 2011). Ideally, the
wear rate shown in Fig. 5(a) should be considered and the DMC
geometry should change during simulation. However, a dynamic
and complicated wear profile is extremely difficult to consider by
the present CFD-DEM model, especially for the solution of CFD
due to the meshing complexity. Therefore, only a simplified wear
profile is investigated in this work as shown in Fig. 5(b). It is as-
sumed that the thickness of the wall removed will start from the
middle of the cone section of the DMC, and increases linearly to-
wards the bottom of the spigot. As shown in Table 3, the quantity
of the wall removed at the bottom of the spigot can also be ex-
pressed as the angle of a or the life time of the spigot wall. 4 sim-
ulations were carried out to investigate the impact of geometry
change. In each run, the thickness of the wall removed at the bot-
tom of the spigot increases by a constant value (=5% of the original
spigot diameter or 16.85 mm) in the current work. Correspond-
ingly, the angle a or the life time of the spigot wall also increases
gradually as shown in the table.
The simulations are all unsteady, undertaken using the unstea-
dy solver in ANSYS Fluent. The flow of water–air flow is firstly
solved to reach its macroscopically steady state that is defined as
the state when the flow field does not change significantly with
time. Then, the flow of a mixture of water, air, magnetite particles
is solved to reach its macroscopically steady state. Finally, the flow
of coal particles is effected. This is done by injecting coal particles
continuously from the inlet. The number of particles injected in a
given time is calculated so as to match the pre-set M:C ratio. At
the beginning of the injection of coal particles, the medium flow
may change significantly due to the influence of the solids. After
some time, the medium flow reaches another macroscopically
steady state. In order to get the wear rate and partition perfor-
mance of coal particles, the information on particle–wall impacts
and coal particles exiting from the overflow is collected after
reaching this macroscopically steady state (it takes about 15 s to
reach this state in this work).
96 K.W. Chu et al. / Minerals Engineering 56 (2014) 91–101

Table 2
Operational parameters used in the simulation.

Phase Parameter Symbol Units Value

3
Solid Density q kg/m 1200–2200
Particle diameter di mm 25 or 0.25
Rolling friction coefficient lr mm 0.005
Sliding friction coefficient ls – 0.3
Poisson’s ratio m – 0.3
Young’s modulus E N/m2 1  107
Damping coefficient c – 0.3
Particle velocity at inlet – m/s 3.8
Gas Density q kg/m3 1.225
Viscosity l kg/m/s 1.8  105
Velocity at inlet – m/s 3.9
Water Density q kg/m3 998.2
Viscosity l kg/m/s 0.001
Velocity at inlet – m/s 3.9
Magnetite Density q kg/m33 4945
Sizes (volume fractions in slurry) – lm 10 (4.0%), 20 (3.4%), 30 (1.9%), 40 (1.5%), 50 (1.3%) and 80 (1.1%)
Viscosity l kg/m/s Ishii and Mishima (1984)
Velocity at inlet – m/s 3.9
Medium Density q kg/m3 1550

Table 3
The simulation conditions used in the present study (the other conditions are the same as those shown in Table 2).

Run Coal particle density distribution Coal particle size (mm) M:C ratio by volume Life time of the spigot wall (a/Year)
1 Coking coal 25 3 0/0
2 5
3 7
4 Thermal coal 25 5
5 0.25
6 25 1.02/0.84
7 2.04/1.68
8 3.07/2.51
9 4.10/3.37

Fig. 4. Particle density distributions for coking coal and thermal coal.

4. Results and discussion

4.1. Model validation

As described in Section 2, the proposed modelling involves a

few steps. This is because of the complexity of DMC flow and the
absence of experimental studies reported. On the other hand, this
step-wise approach offers a way to use the existing data to verify
the proposed model.
The modelling in step 1 is actually the same as that used in the
modelling of the gas–liquid flow in a hydrocyclone. To validate this
approach, the experimental data of Hsieh (1988) were used. The
measured results are in good agreement with those measured, as
reported elsewhere (Wang et al., 2007). Step 2 adds the medium,
i.e., magnetite particles, into consideration. To date, there are no
Fig. 5. Predicted wear rate at the horizontal and central section of the DMC (a) and
schematic drawing of the assumed profile of a worn spigot (b).
experimental data about the velocity profiles of such particle
phases. What is available is the medium density distribution, mea-
sured by Subramanian (2002). The simulated profiles are very
much similar to that measured, as reported by Wang et al.
(2009b). In step 3, DEM was added to the model to simulate the
flow of coal particles on the base of the developed CFD model.
The simulated partition performance of coal particles of different
 K.W. Chu et al. / Minerals Engineering 56 (2014) 91–101
Fig. 6. Predicted wear rate (bottom view) at the DMC walls for coking coal (particle
size is 25 mm) under different M:C ratios.
sizes compared favourably with the experiments (Chu et al.,
2009b).
The results reported in this work are not directly validated since
there are no suitable experimental data available. Nonetheless, as
shown in Fig. 5, the predicted ‘‘groove’’ wear pattern agrees with
the experimental observation (Wood, 1990) and the predicted se-
vere wear locations (vortex finder and spigot walls) also agree with
those observed in practice. The agreement confirms the usefulness
of the present CFD-DEM results, at least qualitatively.
4.2. Prediction of wear rate
Medium-to-coal (M:C) ratio is one of the most important
parameters in the operation of DMCs. Fig. 6 shows the effect of
M:C ratio on wear rate for coking coal. It can be seen that the
Fig. 7. Predicted wear rate at the DMC walls for different coal types (particle density distributions are shown in Fig. 4): (a), coking coal (particle size is 25 mm); (b), thermal
coal (particle size is 25 mm); and (c), thermal coal (particle size is 0.25 mm).
97
Fig. 8. Simulated quantity of wall removed within 30 s and time-average particle–
wall interaction intensity.
general trend is that the severe wearing locations are the vortex
finder, the involute wall and the cone wall. It can also be seen that
the wear rate generally increases with a decrease of the M:C ratio.
This is because there are more particles residing in the DMC when
the M:C ratio is low, which leads to more particle–wall interactions
in the system.
It is also found that the gravity effect is obvious when particle
size is large. For large particles (d = 25 mm in the current cases),
as shown in Fig. 7(a) and (b), an obvious trend is that the wear
of the bottom wall is much faster than that of the top wall due
to the gravity effect. On the other hand, for small particles
(d = 0.25 mm in the current case), as shown in Fig. 7(c), this trend
is not obvious. This is because the fluid drag force is much larger
than the gravity force for small particles.
Fig. 7 shows that the wear rate is heavily depending on coal
type. It can be seen that the wear rate for coking coal (Fig. 7(a))
98 K.W. Chu et al. / Minerals Engineering 56 (2014) 91–101

Previously, the possible wear problem has been quantified by

use of the so-called Time Averaged Collision Intensity (TACI)
(Chu and Yu, 2008b; Chu et al., 2011). The TACI is defined as below:

X
t¼T X
km
jf cn;i þ f dn;i þ f ct;i þ f dt;i j
t¼0 i¼1
TACI ¼ ð6Þ
Ss  T s

where Ss is the area of a sample wall surface, Ts is the sampling time,

Fig. 9. Simulated quantity of wall removed within 30 s and severe wear locations
inside the DMC.
is generally lower than that for thermal coal (Fig. 7(b) and (c)),
especially at the spigot wall. This is because there are more high
density particles in the thermal coal which would report to the
underflow along the spigot wall.
km is the number of particles making contact with the sample wall
at a given time. In the calculation, this is done by dividing the DMC
walls into many small elements and TACI is calculated for each ele-
ment. Physically, it can be understood as the particle–wall interac-
tion force per unit area and time.
In this work, the wear rate in run 4 is compared with the TACI of
particle–wall interaction, as shown in Fig. 8. It can be seen that
they have similar spatial distributions. Both of them are high at
the vortex finder, the top of the cylinder wall and the spigot wall.
This confirms that the TACI of particle–wall interaction can be lar-
gely used to qualitatively investigate the wear problem.
Fig. 9 shows the detailed severe wear locations and wear rate
for run 4. It can be clearly seen that the severe wear locations
are the inside wall of the spigot or the lower part of the cone wall
and the outside wall of the vortex finder. It can also be seen that

Lower cone part / Cylinder part Outer vortex

Upper cone part below vortex
spigot finder wall
finder

Fig. 10. The variation of simulated wear rate along the axial position of the DMC. The positions of Lines I–IV are shown in Fig. 9 (Lines I and II: Top and bottom of the vertical
slice respectively; Lines III and VI: Top and bottom of the horizontal slice respectively).

Fig. 11. Snapshots of the spatial distribution of particle velocities at a slice located at the middle of the cylinder section and perpendicular to the DMC axis (particles are
coloured by particle velocity). (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)
 K.W. Chu et al. / Minerals Engineering 56 (2014) 91–101
Fig. 12. Snapshots of the spatial distribution of particle–particle interactions, particle–wall interactions, total forces on particles, time-averaged velocities at a slice/section
that is located at the middle of the cylinder and perpendicular to the DMC axis (the forces on particles are normalised by dividing the gravitational force).
the wear rate at the horizontal slice is largely symmetric. However,
the wear rate at the vertical slice is non-symmetric and the wear
rate at the bottom is generally higher than that at the top, which
is caused by the gravity that points from the top to the bottom.
Fig. 10 quantifies the wear rate shown in Fig. 9. It can be seen
that the wear rate at the outer vortex finder wall is generally larger
than that at the inner spigot wall, while that at the inner cylinder
wall is much smaller. Another phenomenon shown in Fig. 10 is that
the wear rate is not symmetric. At the inner spigot wall, the bottom
wall has the largest wear rate, which is caused by the gravity. How-
ever, at the outer vortex finder wall, the top wall has the largest
wear rate. This could be due to the short circuit flow that leads
to strong particle–wall and particle–particle interactions there.
The short circuit flow is caused by the collision between the slurry
already in the system and that newly entering the system (Wang
et al., 2006), which would squeeze particles to move inward and
thus hit the top wall of the vortex finder. This phenomenon is also
observed in the present CFD-DEM simulation.
4.3. Microdynamics analysis
In this section, particle scale information obtained by the cur-
rent CFD-DEM approach is analysed to improve the fundamental
understanding of the system. The gravity effect is examined as it
is an interesting phenomenon in the wearing of DMC walls and
may lead to non-symmetrical geometry and unstable flow of both
medium phase and coal particles.
Fig. 11 shows the dynamic flow pattern of coal particles. It can
be seen that the solids velocity is low in the regions close to the
cylinder walls but high in the regions close to the centre, which
is because the tangential velocity has a peak in the regions close
to the DMC centre (Chu et al., 2009b). This figure also shows that
the flow is unsteady and the flow pattern changes with time. In
the centre, some of the particles are moving in strands. It can also
be seen that the particle concentration is relatively low at the left
side of the slice, which can be further confirmed by the time-aver-
aged solids concentration distribution as shown in Fig. 12. This is
99
because gravity will prevent particles being lifted up by fluid drag
force to the top when particles are located on the right side of the
DMC.
Fig. 12 also shows the information of particle–particle and par-
ticle–wall interactions and total force on particles. It can be ob-
served that the particle–particle interaction force is large inside
solid strands and the TACI of particle–particle interactions (now
defined as particle–particle interaction force per unit volume per
unit time) is high at the left side of the slice, which could be due
to the gravity effect that makes particles descend faster and thus
hit other particles below them. The particle–wall interaction force
is smaller than particle–particle interaction force and is quite local-
ised. The TACI of particle–wall interaction is higher at the left side
of the bottom wall, because particles are falling down due to grav-
ity at the left side of the DMC. The total force on particles generally
points to the centre of the DMC, which is due to the pressure gra-
dient force which is the dominant force for separation of particles
by density in a DMC (Chu et al., 2009a).
4.4. Effect of worn spigot wall
As time progresses, wear will lead to a change of the DMC
geometry and thus affect the DMC performance. In this work, as
the first step to study the effect of wear in a DMC, the effect of a
worn spigot wall is investigated and the conditions are shown in
Fig. 5 and Table 3.
In a DMC, medium flow largely controls the flow of coal parti-
cles (Chu et al., 2009a; Wang et al., 2009b). The macroscopic
parameters commonly used to describe medium flow are opera-
tional head, medium split and medium differential. The opera-
tional head is defined as the pressure drop between the inlet and
outlet of the vortex finder of a DMC divided by medium feed den-
sity, gravity acceleration and DMC body diameter. The medium
split is the mass flow rate of medium at the outlet of the vortex fin-
der divided by that at the inlet of the DMC, i.e., the proportion of
the medium reporting to the overflow. The medium differential
100 K.W. Chu et al. / Minerals Engineering 56 (2014) 91–101
Fig. 13. Simulated operational head (a), medium split (b) and medium differential
(c) as a function of the angle of a defined in Fig. 5 or the life time of the spigot wall.
Fig. 14. Simulated partition performance in terms of Ep and cut density as a
function of the angle of a defined in Fig. 5 or the life time of the spigot wall.
is the difference in medium density between the overflow and
underflow.
Fig. 13 shows the effect of wear on the medium flow. As the an-
gle a or the life time of the spigot wall increases, head and medium
split decrease and medium differential decreases to a minimum
and then increases slightly. This could be useful for the DMC oper-
ators to adjust the flow by changing the medium flow rate or med-
ium feed density to offset the effect of wearing.
The performance of the DMC was evaluated by calculating a
partition curve, separation density (D50) and Ecart probable (Ep).
D50 is defined as the relative density (RD) of particles that have
equal probability of reporting to either underflow or overflow.
Ep = (D75  D25)/2, where D75 and D25 are the RDs at which 75%
and 25% of feed particles report to underflow respectively. They
are the parameters commonly used to determine the separating
performance of a DMC (Wood, 1990). Fig. 14 shows the effect of
wearing of spigot wall on the separation efficiency of coal particles
in the DMC. As the angle a increases, Ep increases while cut density
D50 decreases, caused by the decrease of head as shown in
Fig. 13(a). The decrease of separation efficiency and drift of cut
density could deteriorate product quality and lead to a loss of valu-
able coal particles to reject.
5. Summary
A CFD-DEM model coupled with the Finnie wear model (1960)
has been developed to predict the wear rate of DMC walls due to
the impact of run-of-mine coal particles under various conditions.
Based on the simulation results, the following conclusions can be
made:
 Generally speaking, the severe wear locations are the inner wall
of the spigot and the outer wall of the vortex finder. This sug-
gests that during wearing the spigot inner diameter may
increase due to worn spigot wall, which would significantly
affect the DMC performance. On the other hand, according to
the previous work (Wang et al., 2009a), the erosion of the vortex
finder outer wall may not significantly affect the DMC perfor-
mance if the vortex finder wall is not completely worn out. This
also explains why a thick vortex finder wall should be used in
practice.
 The specific wear pattern depends on operational conditions
and particle properties or coal type. The wear rate generally
increases with a decrease of M:C ratio. For a given M:C ratio,
the wear rate for thermal coal is higher than that for coking
coal, especially at the spigot.
 Gravity may cause non-symmetric wear rate for large particles.
But its effect is not obvious for fine particles.
 The wear of the inner spigot wall is found to affect the DMC per-
formance significantly. It is shown that as the life of the spigot
wall increases, operational head, medium split and cut density
decrease, Ep increases, and medium differential decreases to a
minimum and then increases slightly.
The proposed approach could be a useful and general tool to
study the effect of wear in DMCs. However, its refinement and
application will be carried out in our future studies. The results
or findings for the present study can only be used qualitatively
due to the assumptions used in the current model.
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to Minco Tech Australia Pty Ltd., Aus-
tralian Coal Association Research Program (ACARP) and Australia
Research Council (ARC) for the financial support of the work.
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