Cyclone performance and design

Abstract Cyclones are probably the most widely used industrial dust collecting devices. Although many procedures for calculating cyclone pressure drop and collection efficiency have been developed, current design practice emphasizes past experience rather than an analytical design procedure. In this paper, five pressure drop theories and four efficiency theories are evaluated against experimental data taken from the literature. One pressure drop and one efficiency theory are judged “best” and used with an optimization procedure to develop a cyclone design method. This design method gives a means of calculating the dimensions of a theoretically optimum cyclone for any set of design criteria. A cyclone designed by this procedure is compared with a standard high efficiency cyclone, and is found theoretically to have better efficiency under identical operating conditions.