Improving the design of a pickup head for particle removal using computational fluid dynamics

The purpose of this article is to optimize the design of a pickup head that removes particles from road surface. A validated computational fluid dynamics model was proposed to evaluate the particle removal performance of the designed pickup head with different inclination angles. The gas-particle flow through the pickup head was modelled using the EulerianLagrangian approach. The realizable k model and the discrete particle model were adopted to simulate gas flow field and solid particle trajectories, respectively. The results indicate that the inclination angle of the rear edge wall and the pressure drop across the pickup head have great impact on the particle removal performance. Both the particle overall removal efficiency and the grade efficiency increase with the increment of inclination angle, and higher pressure drop can pick up more particles from the road surface, but it would induce unnecessary energy consumption. Therefore, it is necessary to design a pickup head with high removal efficiency and low pressure drop. Through simulation, the optimal angle should be 135 for the range of the inclination angle in this study, and pressure drop is about 2400Pa. Furthermore, more information can be acquired for pickup head design.