A study on advanced concept for fine particle separation

Fine particle separation is essential to a lot of high technologies in energy and other areas. The need for high standard of separation performance challenges conventional gas/solid separation devices like cyclones. A brief comparative analysis on some previous efforts of improving fine particle separation is made. Numerical simulation for the three-dimensional flow in a multicrossing flow separator is introduced. The result shows a flow pattern of solid-body vortex in the channels, which is different with that of conventional cyclones. Two criteria C1 and C2 are proposed for evaluating the performance of fine particle separation, which correlate the separation performance with the characteristic flow parameters of separators. The comparison of the separation performance for different separators based on C1 and C2 indicates that the rotational flow pattern in separators affects the performance of fine particle separation. Finally, an innovative idea for improving fine particle separation is suggested and explained.