A simultaneous separation of magnetic and conductive particles in a designed permanent magnet drum separator

Abstract

The aim of this work is the investigation of the simultaneous separation of magnetic (𝜇 _r > 80) and conductive (σ ≈ 6 ×10⁷ S/m) particles in a designed magnetic separator. Such a separator consists mainly of a drum on which permanent magnets are arranged and a conveyor belt carrying the material to be purified. The separately driving of the drum and the conveyor belt allows the independent control of the frequency of the generated magnetic field and the displacement speed of the material to be treated. To generate high magnetic field, identical NdFeB permanent magnet bars with residual magnetic flux density B _r = 1.2 T are used. To compute the particles trajectories, the magnetic field and the particle dynamic governing equations have been solved using the numerical finite element (FEM) and Runge Kutta (RK4) methods. The computing results have shown that the proposed separator permits the simultaneous separation of magnetic and conductive particles. To check the validity of the numerical results, experiments have been carried out on ferromagnetic powder and conductive particles of different sizes.