Microparticle Separation by Cyclonic Separation

The ability to separate particles based on their size has wide ranging applications from the industrial to the medical. Currently, cyclonic separators are primarily used in agriculture and manufacturing to syphon out contaminates or products from an air supply. This has led us to believe that cyclonic separation has more applications than the agricultural and industrial. Using the OpenFoam computational package, we were able to determine the flow parameters of a vortex in a cyclonic separator in order to segregate dust particles to a cutoff size of tens of nanometers. To test the model, we constructed an experiment to separate a test dust of various sized particles. We filled a chamber with Arizona test dust and utilized an acoustic suspension technique to segregate particles finer than a coarse cutoff size and introduce them into the cyclonic separation apparatus where they were further separated via a vortex following our computational model. The size of the particles separated from this experiment will be used to further refine our model.