A Low Cost Micro Scale Cyclone Microparticle Separator - Design and CFD Analysis

Microparticle separation process has a variety of application varying from application in biological and biomedical industries for analysis and diagnosis, in biogas manufacturing to separate phases as well as in defense sector for detection of biological weapons like anthrax. Available electrical, magnetic, acoustic and various other methods are either very costly or not portable. The proposed design of micro scale cyclone separator is low cost as well as portable and easy to manufacture. Huge cyclone separators are widely used in various industries since decades but due to lack of research in micro scale cyclones no direct and sufficient data is available. This research attempts to develop a microscale cyclone separator and study the effect of parameters like inlet velocity on pressure drop in a micro scale cyclone separator. It further studies the effect of particle size on collection efficiency through Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) approach. CFD analysis has been proved very efficient for calculations in larger cyclones and hence is used as a tool in this study as well, though experimental verification is recommended. Computational experiments were performed using FLUENT. The results obtained are compared with various empirical relations developed for huge cyclone separators and similarities and dissimilarities in trends are analyzed. Finally a multi-cyclone model is proposed to obtain higher collection efficiency.