Filtering cylindrical–conical hydrocyclone

Abstract Hydrocyclones have versatile applications in various industrial processes. They functionn on the principle of centrifugal separation to remove a dispersed phase (particles or drops) from a continuous phase (fluid). In unconventional filtering hydrocyclones, the separation efficiency and energy costs have been improved by combining filtration with centrifugal separation. This work investigated experimentally the effect of incorporating a cylinder and a porous cone in a conventional hydrocyclone. It also evaluated the effects of the main geometric dimensions of the separator on the hydrocyclone performance. A differential-evolution algorithm was applied to optimize the hydrocyclone performance, which was represented as the maximum total efficiency and minimum Euler number. The experimental results validated the optimization results and showed that hydrocyclones with optimized geometries exhibited higher total efficiencies (89.59%) and lower Euler numbers (582) than hydrocyclones with other experimental configurations.