Cyclone Separators Design Calculation

Cyclone Separators Design Calculation

Cyclone Separators: The most widely used type of dustcollection equipment is the cyclone, in which dust-laden gas enters a cylindrical or conical chamber tangentially at one or more points and leaves through a central opening. The dust particles, by virtue of their inertia, will tend to move toward the outside separator wall, from which they are led into a receiver. A cyclone is essentially a settling chamber in which gravitational acceleration is replaced by centrifugal acceleration. At operating conditions commonly employed, the centrifugal separating force or acceleration may range from 5 times gravity in very large diameter, low-resistance cyclones, to 2500 times gravity in very small, high-resistance units. The immediate entrance to a cyclone is usually rectangular.

Fields of Application: Within the range of their performance capabilities, cyclone collectors offer one of the least expensive means of dust collection from the standpoint of both investment and operation. Their major limitation is that unless very small units are used, their efficiency is low for collection of particles smaller than 5 mm. Although cyclones may be used to collect particles larger than 200 mm, gravity settling chambers or simple inertial separators (such as gas-reversal chambers) are usually satisfactory and less subject to abrasion. In special cases in which the dust is highly flocculated or high dust concentrations (over 230 g/m3, or 100 gr/ft3) are encountered, cyclones will remove dusts having small particle sizes. In certain instances efficiencies as high as 98 percent have been attained on dusts having ultimate particle sizes of 0.1 to 2.0 mm because of the

predominant effect of flocculation. Cyclones are used to remove both solids and liquids from gases and have been operated at temperatures as high as 1000°C and pressures as high as 50,700 kPa (500 atm).