Estimation of the Performance of a Permanent Magnet Drum Separator Intended to Dry Magnetic Separation of Iron Particles

In this work, the performance of an eight-pole horizontal NdFeB permanent magnet drum separator intended to the separation of fine size magnetic particles from dry iron ore fed vertically in a generated open gradient magnetic field has been investigated. Such investigation was based on the computation and analysis of the particle trajectories that give all information on their separation. To take into account the non-linearity and coupling of the governing equations and the domain geometrical complexities, a 3D numerical resolution program based on the coupling of finite element (FE) and fourth order Range-Kutta (RK4) methods has been developed and used. The computing results have shown that for the chosen material feeding, the separation efficiency of iron particles of low magnetic permeability decreases with the decreasing of the particle size and material feeding width.