Performance Evaluation of Spiral Separator for Coal Cleaning using Mixture Model

Spiral separator is considered to be the most effective gravity separator, capable of processing a wide range of minerals such as coal, iron, chromite, gold, zircon and other heavy minerals ores (Figure 1).1,2 Combined action of gravity, hydrodynamic forces and the centrifugal forces that act on the solid particles, causes the stratification of gangue and pure mineral particles.3 With the increase in the demands of coal fines recovery, spiral separators are widely deployed in the concentration process of 0.1 mm to 3 mm coal. In this study, coal slurry is simulated with a two- phase mixture model in which the flow-particle interaction is considered using a standard k-ε turbulence model.