Airvate Blog

The pressure loss of a cyclone separator is divided into three main contributions from: the cyclone inlet, cyclone body, and vortex finder (gas outlet). The gas swirl inside the cyclone body is very useful for particle separation, but as this swirl exits the cyclone through the gas outlet, the rotational energy which is stored within is actually lost. This is the main source of the pressure loss of a cyclone separator. A lot of studies have been conducted trying to reduce the pressure loss caused by this rotational energy in the exiting gas flow through modifications on the gas outlet: Modify the length and diameter, Change its shape from cylinder-shape to cone-shape. These modifications can indeed reduce the pressure loss, but cannot be done to existing cyclones inexpensively. Some studies looked outside of a cyclone separator. Here are two examples. In one study, in order to minimize the cyclone’s pressure loss, a pressure recovery type diffuser known as a radial diffuse...

  Introduction Cyclone separators have been applied in industrial fields for over a century to separate particles from gas streams. They have an inherent simplicity of design that usually encompasses no moving parts with the ability to collect fine particulates. Current designs of industrial high-efficiency cyclones can provide collection efficiency of 90 percent and higher for particles with diameters as small as 2 microns with specific gravity of 1. The inlet flow features used in design are the mean velocity and mixed mean dust concentration at the inlet, and the type of inlet. Based on these assumptions, flow patterns inside of a cyclone and its performance (pressure loss and grade collection efficiency) are developed and calculated. However, all design procedures appear to treat the cyclone as a device which operates independently from the flow configuration upstream. In particular, for a cyclone collecting dust from a gas flow, the orientation of elbows in the inlet duct...

  Introduction Particle size distribution data of a material to be collected is very important for the selection and sizing of a dust collector. If a population of particles is represented by a single number (or mean), there can be many different measures of mean sizes (or central tendency): arithmetic, geometric, quadratic, cubic, biquadratic, and harmonic to name just a few, each appropriate to specific uses. The mean particle size is rarely quoted in isolation: it is usually related to some application and used as a single number to represent the full size distribution. It represents the distribution by some property which is vital to the application or process under study; if two size distributions have the same mean, the two materials are likely to behave in the process in the same way. The arithmetic mean The arithmetic mean is the measure of central tendency most widely used in general statistics, and is essential to a few procedures (such as defining a normal prob...

  Introduction A cyclone separator is also called a cyclone dust collector. The typical industrial cyclone is a centrifugal reverse-flow cyclone. The dust outlet of a cyclone is called a material discharge outlet or cone-tip. Sketch of a reverse-flow, cylinder-on-cone cyclone with a tangential inlet I have been asked how the diameter of the dust outlet affects the performance of a cyclone a couple of times by colleagues and final users. Normally, when engineers size and/or design a cyclone, they pick a standard one from manuals or handbooks. However, when dust loading is high, cyclone designers worry about whether the dust outlet is big enough. If the separated dust cannot be discharged immediately, a cyclone will not be functional. In reality, after a cyclone was put into use, final users worried about the same thing. When there is blockage at the cone bottom, they have to hit the bottom part with a hammer to dislodge the plug, and this often leaves dents or deformation on...