Effects of Air Vortex Finder Length and Outlet Diameter Variations on Oil Palm Loose Fruit Collector

Abstract

Oil palm is one of the largest economy sectors in Malaysia. Among the problems faced in the estates are oil palm loose fruits deposition which is currently being collected manually in the industry. Hence, an oil palm loose fruit collector is designed using cyclone separator mechanism and was studied using computational fluid dynamics (CFD). In the current study, Reynold’s stress model (RSM) and the Discrete phase model (DPM) was employed to navigate numerical simulations where the vortex finder of the cyclone separator was varied with two factors which are the vortex finder length and outlet diameter. Wall was set to a no slip condition with standard wall functions. Hydraulic diameter of the gas outlet is B_c=0.1 . Hydraulic diameters of the particle’s outlet are J_c=0.15  and 0.2  respectively. Turbulence intensity at the gas and particles outlet are specified at 5%. An injection with density 995.7   and 0.04  was set to simulate oil palm loose fruit collection into the system. Ultimately, effects of vortex finder and outlet variations on the pressure drop and collection efficiency were then analyzed. Results indicate that an outlet diameter of 0.18 m and vortex finder length of 0.405 m is favourable for the oil palm loose fruit machine with a collection efficiency of 88.71 % and pressure drop of 477.66 Pa.