Hydrocylone for Separation and Classification

Hydrocyclones are found to be widely used in a variety areas of industry. Their main applications may be divided into two categories: 1) hydrocyclone thickeners which is a straightforward separation of solid from liquid and 2) hydrocyclone classifiers which is used for material classification purpose. Many theoretical models have been developed to design hydrocyclone used for solid-liquid separation. However the design concept of hydrocyclone for classification work has not been clearly well defined. Thus in this work the hydrocyclone was constructed according to the suggestion of Rietema. Both separation and classification performances of hydrocyclone were tested. It was found that this hydrocyclone can successfully separate solid from liquid. The efficiency of solid removal is about 100%. For the classification test, the particle size of solid in underflow is larger than that in overflow. Nevertheless, the best sharpness of cut size of particle was not observed. The effect of main operating parameters and relative geometrical proportions of hydrocyclone on classification performance have to be further studied to obtain a new design for solid-solid separation purpose.