Hydrocyclone equivalent settling area factor at higher concentrations and developing a performance chart

Abstract

Abstract The equivalent settling area factor allows for comparison amongst different centrifuge separators. For hydrocyclones, the so far developed factor does not consider the effect of concentration of solid particles c in the feed stream, because particle interactions at high concentrations cause hindered settling and reduce hydrocyclone performance. The focus of this paper is a modification of this factor to allow prediction of the influence of higher particle concentration in the feed stream. In particular, the equivalent area factor is modified at high particle concentration by applying different forms of hindered settling concentration functions and using data obtained from experiment or from existing empirical correlations. This results in a set of modified models that are evaluated using statistical techniques. Through statistical analysis, the function f ( c ) = c 0.0488 exp ( - 9.445 c ) is selected to modify the equivalent settling area for hydrocyclones. A performance chart is developed for hydrocyclones by undertaking the modified equivalent area model that can be used in hydrocyclone design applications. The developed performance chart is validated and is shown to be capable of predicting the hydrocyclone performance over a wide range of hydrocyclone flow rates and separation cut sizes. This chart is compared with a performance chart available in the literature and the chart in the literature is shown to over-predict the hydrocyclone performance.