Rubber particles produced during industrial rubber manufacturing pose significant health and environmental risks. Due to their small size, these particles are difficult to efficiently separate and recover. Previous studies have shown that increasing the annular gap can reduce the circulation of small particles within the hydrocyclone. However, the optimal design of the annular gap structure has not been thoroughly investigated. This paper focuses on the structural optimization of the annular space, dividing it into three parts: annular width (w), insertion depth (L), and diameter (Dh). Single-factor analysis reveals that an increase in annular width lowers the internal pressure field; an increase in annular insertion depth causes vortex movement downward, reducing the separation zone; and an increase in annular diameter generates vortices within the annular gap. Multi-factor analysis using GMDH and NSGA-II shows that the GMDH model has excellent predictive capability, with R2 values of 94.23 % for separation efficiency and 92.77 % for pressure drop. The optimal structure obtained from NSGA-II is the C-type hydrocyclone (Dh: 7.45, L: 7.2, w: 3.96), with separation efficiency and pressure drop of 85.72 % and 0.1649 MPa, respectively. The optimized hydrocyclone shows improvements of 4.46 % in separation efficiency and 8.89 % in pressure drop compared to the non-optimized performance. This study applies genetic algorithms to the structural optimization of the annular gap, providing theoretical insights into the design of hydrocyclone annular gap structures.
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