A theoretical model for calculating pressure drop in the cone area of light dispersion hydrocyclones [An article from: Chemical Engineering Journal]

This digital document is a journal article from Chemical Engineering Journal, published by Elsevier in 2006. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
Pressure drop in a hydrocyclone reflects the energy necessary for a separation process. It is very important to predict pressure drop in a hydrocyclone design. In this paper, pressure drop in a light dispersion hydrocyclone is conceptually divided into two parts: dissipated pressure drop and effective pressure drop. The latter is the pressure drop in the major separation region that represents the energy converted from static to kinetic form. Based on velocity distributions established by ZHAO and MA, a theoretical model is developed to calculate effective pressure drop in the cone region of light dispersion hydrocyclones. Experimental results prove that the model can give a very good prediction of effective pressure drop. Though the calculated results are more or less higher than the measured, their differences are small enough to be neglected in a hydrocyclone design practice. It is indicated that effective pressure drop can be correlated to flowrate by @Dp"B"C=-0.000816-0.00186Q+0.00667Q^2 in the range of Q=1-5m^3/h at F=6% and R"o=4mm for 30mm hydrocyclone with cycloid and involute inlets. Increase of split ratio is shown to lead to decrease of effective pressure drop, while overflow orifice diameter affects the effective pressure drop in a reverse manner. According to the model developed in present paper, it is possible to study influences of operating conditions, design parameters and fluid properties on effective pressure drop.