Cyclone dust collectors are often employed as an initial stage collector or prefilter to lighten heavy dusts loads before being sent to a primary collector like a baghouse or cartridge collector. Cyclones are also used for product classification or for material recovery in applications where only dust fines need to be removed and larger size dust can be reclaimed and reintroduced back into the process.
By removing coarse particles from the gas stream cyclone allow fabric filter collectors to handle only the finer particles. This increases the efficiency and service life of the filters in the baghouse or cartridges in the cartridge collector, protecting your larger and most costly units and their filters from unnecessary wear and tear.
The incoming dirty air enters the cyclone and spins quickly as it moves down and then back up the unit on its way to the exiting through the outlet. The centrifugal force generated by spinning the air and it changing directions repeatedly causing the larger dust particles to be flung outwards where they strike the side of the unit and then fall down towards the discharge. The most common style cyclone creates a dual vortex, a main downward vortex to disperse the coarser matter, and a secondary upward vortex to remove the finer particles on the return to the outlet to the duct system.
Again as with the other kinds of inertial separators like knockout chambers, baffle plates, this systems main advantage is the lack of moving parts thus requiring less maintenance and repair. While it can be designed to remove a specific size range of particles, it still remains best used as a precleaner to eliminate coarse particles and ease the load on more efficient fabric filter units further downstream.
Common applications include mining, cement, metals, wood, and other applications that generate large amounts of large, coarse dust.
Cyclones are most commonly used as prefilters to lighten dust loading on baghouses and cartridge collectors. They can also be used in areas with highly combustible dusts such as wood or biomass grinding options. In some applications, they are used to sort out larger sized material fr reclamation or to prevent it from entering the baghouse such as timings of paper or wood, direct reduced iron or refuse derived fuel products. They can also be used to reduce loading into a baghouse so a high inlet entry can be used to reduce internal velocities (can velocity and interstitial velocity) improving baghouse operation and filter life.