2018 9th IEEE Control and System Graduate Research Colloquium (ICSGRC 2018), 3 - 4 August 2018, Shah Alam,

Malaysia

Development and Experimental Study on Pareto

Optimum Design of Cyclone Separator
Kok Mun Ng*, Ahmad Shafiee Harfin, N.A. Razak, M.A. Masduki
Fakulti Kejuruteraan Elektrik
Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM)
40450, Shah Alam, Selangor
(kokmun77@yahoo.com.sg)*

Abstract – Economic growth in the course of
industrial development is causing an increasingly
severe environmental problem such as the emission of
dust particles. One of the ways that technology can
help in combating dust emission is by creating particle
separator using cyclone. In this paper, Pareto
optimum design guidelines of cyclone separator
adapted from a previous simulation study is built and
experimented. The goal is to determine the cyclone
design parameters that have the maximum collection
efficiency and whether the efficiency matches
simulation studies. There were three different designs
of the cyclone separator based on Pareto optimum
design guidelines. These three cyclones have been
fabricated using aluminum and polymerizing vinyl
chloride (PVC). Experiments were conducted on these
cyclones to determine their efficiencies due to different
design parameters and the type of dust material used.
The result shows that cyclone performance varies with
cyclone design parameters. In addition, the size of dust
particles could affect efficiency of cyclone separators.
Keywords – Pareto optimum design,
separator, experimental study.
I. INTRODUCTION
Many industries have applied cyclone dust collector or
separator to handle dust emission within its premises. The
cyclone separator device is utilized in gas-solid particles
filtration and separation for air pollution control in
industrial applications. Cyclone separator has many
advantages such as low cost, simple setup and easy to
fabricate, as well as easy maintenance. In addition, the
cyclone separator has turned out to be one of the
significantly decisive particle removal devices because the
device can withstand high temperature and high voltage
[1].
Numerous design factors influence the cyclone
performance, including the cylinder, vertebral body, inlet
and outlet pipes with another part of cyclone not only
their size but also together with their configuration. Type
of inlet and outlet of the cone also affected the
performance of the system. According to Elsayed and
Lacor [3], the collection efficiency results of the cyclone
were affected more vital by inlet width compared with the
inlet height. Wu F. et al. [1] found that smaller exhaust
pipe outlet improves the separation output. Zhao et al. [4]
examined the performance of two forms of cyclones with
the standard single inlet and double spiral inlets. The new
type of cyclone separator using the adding spiral dual inlet
can enhance the particle separation efficiency. Thus far, a
variant of cyclone designs has been suggested and
introduced in the literature.
Many researchers have performed experiments and
studies to extend the efficiency of the cyclone-based
system by assessing the effect of the operational and
geometric parameter. Alteration of cyclone parameter by
varying the length and diameter of the cylindrical segment
of a cylinder-on-cone has been fabricated and tested [5-6].
From the result of the previous experiments showed that
once the cyclone proportion is more significant than the
outlet dimension, the reduction in cyclone size resulted in
the higher efficiency of collecting particles, in the
meantime also increases the pressure drop. From another
point of view, Safikhani et al. [7] and Hoffman et al. [8]
have studied the effects of the cyclone height. The study
to improve cyclone performance using computational
fluid dynamics has been explored [9, 10]. Modification to
the operation can include the combination of two or more
cyclones which was presented and analyzed by many
researchers [11, 12]. They mentioned that double cyclone
encompassed not higher assortment efficiency compared
with conventional cyclone and produced a lower pressure
cyclone
drop. In any case, the double cyclone collection efficiency
with electric field improved significantly. When the
effectiveness of the separation is higher, it will produce
higher resistance [1]. This can hinder the development of
the cyclone dust separator.
M. Alitavoli et al. [2] proposed optimum parameters
for the cyclone separator based on Pareto optimum
principles using simulations. However, there are no
practical experiments conducted based on the guidelines
provided. Therefore, this work aims to develop cyclone
separator by using Pareto optimum design proposed in
[2]. The goal is to determine the cyclone design
parameters that have the maximum collection efficiency
and whether the efficiency matches simulation studies in
[2]. Besides that, the experiments are also conducted to
compare the efficiency of the design when operated on a
different type of dust to be separated by the cyclone
separator.
II. METHODOLOGY
This section discusses the methods that have been
used in completing this research project. This section
elaborates on the flowchart, design variables of a cyclone
separator and experimental techniques that were used.

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 2018 9th IEEE Control and System Graduate Research Colloquium (ICSGRC 2018), 3 - 4 August 2018, Shah Alam, Malaysia

A. Project Flowchart in Development and Experimental TABLE I. NOMENCLATURE OF CYCLONE DESIGN

Study on Cyclone Separator Variable Terms
Figure 1 has shows the project flowchart that outlines D The diameter of cyclone body (mm)
the main tasks of the project. This flowchart was
De The width of cyclone vortex finder (mm)
developed with calculations of all constraint that can
occur during the project being executed. The diagram S Length of vortex finder (mm)
shows the project process flow from the beginning until Lup Length of upside cyclone (mm)
the end. Ldown Length of downside cyclone (mm)
Start

C. Design of Cyclone Separator

Literature Review The experiment was performed on three types of
cyclones with different dimensions recommended by
Study theory of Cyclone Pareto optimum design guidelines in [2]. Table 2 gives the
Separator cyclones aspects of each cyclone. All cyclone parts are
built by using polymerizing vinyl chloride (PVC) and
aluminum. The design variables of Cyclone A, B and C
Design Cyclone Separator were calculated based on Pareto optimum design
simulations in [2] which listed the most optimum design
variables. These design variables which were adapted by
Fabricated each of the cyclone (refer to Table IV in [2]) are listed in
Table III. These dimensions were the results of their
simulations, simulated under the range of design variation
No shown in Table IV.
Function?
TABLE II. CYCLONE DIMENSION
Yes
Cyclone De S (mm) Lup Ldown(mm)
Experimenting, testing and (mm) (mm)
analysis
A 50 170 402 188
B 50 250 402 130
Documentation and
presentation
C 50 250 130 127

TABLE III. PARETO OPTIMUM DESIGN VARIABLES

End
Cyclone S/D De/D Lup/D Ldown/D
Fig. 1.Flowchart of the project A 1.170 0.125 2.775 1.297
B 1.725 0.125 2.775 0.905
B. Definition of the Design Variables C 1.725 0.125 0.900 0.875
The design variables of the cyclone in this project is
explained in Table I. Fig. 2 shows the design variables for TABLE IV. CYCLONE DESIGN VARIABLE WITH A SCOPE OF
VARIATION.
the cyclones optimization problems.
Design Variable From To
S/D 0.900 1.725
De/D 0.125 0.600
Lup/D 0.875 2.775
Ldown/D 0.875 2.775

The diameter D of the cyclone is fixed at 145 mm.

Fig. 2. 2D view of cyclone design
One of the parameters had to change as the design of inlet
needs to connect with 50 mm inlet pipe. General design
based on the paper by M. Alitavoli et al. [2] recommend
taking inlet pipes diameter (De = (0.125 to 0.600) x D), so
the design still satisfies the guidelines. Typically, the inlet
and outlet pipe are designed to circular and concentric
cylinder cyclone.
D. Experimental Study and Analysis
There are two experiments to study the efficiency of
the cyclone separators. The primary target of the first
experiment is to quantify the separation efficiencies of the
3 different type of cyclone design namely cyclone A, B
and C developed according to Pareto optimum design

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 2018 9th IEEE Control and System Graduate Research Colloquium (ICSGRC 2018), 3 - 4 August 2018, Shah Alam, Malaysia

specified in Table II. Subsequently, variation of different
dust materials is then tested to show the percentage of
cyclone efficiency for the second experiment.
The test facility is illustrated in Fig. 3. The vacuum
pump is used to provide air suction at the outlet of the
cyclone. The PVC pipe with a length of 600 mm is
connected between the cyclone and vacuum pump. The
same length of PVC is also joined with the inlet where the
dust was fed into the cyclone. The dustbin is attached with
the cyclone for storage of dust that has been separated.
effect of size and weight of dust on cyclone performance.
As the speed of inlet gas velocity produced by the vacuum
pump in a different range, the experiments need to
measure repeatedly on the same point due to the
instability of airflow. The cyclone separation efficiency
was obtained at the end of each trial by weighing
collected dust inside the bins [1]. The test is run 5 times
and fixed 2-minute duration time for each run for the dust
to diffuse. The percentage of efficiency is calculated with
the Equation (1) below.
Efficiency,ɳ = Dust Collecting Quantity(g) / Total Dust
Content (g) x 100 (1)

III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

First, the efficiency of the Cyclone A, B and C was

Fig. 3. Experimental Set-up
Fig. 4 shows the flow chart that outlines experiment
steps to study the cyclone separator efficiency. The
flowchart explains the operation of cyclone mechanism.
Begins with vacuum pump turning on to create a gas inlet
to absorb dust into the cyclone. As the fast-moving air
enters the chamber at the top of the cylinder, the more
massive particle will slam into the wall of cyclone and
slide to the bottom of a dust trap. The weight of dust
collected in the dust trap is obtained to determine the
performance of the separator. The vacuum pump is then
turned off manually within 2-minute time per running test.
measured when tested using flour. Table V, VI and VII
show the results of the experiments. From the results, it
shows that the average efficiency of Cyclone A was
74.80%. The average efficiency of Cyclone B was
86.32%, efficiency increased by 11.52% compared to
Cyclone A. The designed Cyclone C efficiency improved
10.8% compared to Cyclone B with average percentage
97.12%. From all these results, it shows that the smaller
length, Lup, and Ldown of cyclone increases the
performance of the cyclone separator. Inlet insert depth, S
is also an important geometric parameter. The experiment
proved that higher value of S also increases the total
collection separator. These results were found to be
compatible with simulation studies in [2]. The difference
between simulations in [2] (Refer to Table IV in [2]) and
experiment studies of Cyclone A and Cyclone B are
5.19% and 3.05% respectively. The design of Cyclone C
result showed that experimental and simulations are in
close agreement with difference of 0.018%. These results
have slightly different may cause by bigger size of the
inlet, De from Pareto design and different air suction
power.

TABLE V. PERFORMANCE OF CYCLONE A

Dust
Dust Diffuse Overall
Test collecting
content time efficiency
times quantity
(g) (min) (%)
(g)
1 500 2 378 75.60
2 500 2 381 76.20
3 500 2 374 74.80
4 500 2 369 73.80
5 500 2 368 73.60
Average Efficiency 74.80

TABLE VI. PERFORMANCE OF CYCLONE B

Dust
Dust Diffuse Overall
Test collecting
content time efficiency
times quantity
(g) (min) (%)
(g)
Fig 4. Experiment steps for a cyclone separator 1 500 2 424 84.80
Flour, sago and red bean of wide distribution were 2 500 2 426 85.20
employed as test dust. For the first experiment, flour is the 3 500 2 431 86.20
only material tested to analyze the efficiency of 3 4 500 2 436 87.20
different cyclone dimension. Three type of material is 5 500 2 368 88.20
being experimented for the second experiment to show the Average Efficiency 86.32

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 2018 9th IEEE Control and System Graduate Research Colloquium (ICSGRC 2018), 3 - 4 August 2018, Shah Alam, Malaysia

TABLE VII. PERFORMANCE OF CYCLONE C design variable is used. The size and weight of dust
Dust particles can affect the performance of cyclone where the
Dust Diffuse Overall heavier single particle produced the lowest total collection
Test collecting
content time efficiency efficiency. Based on experiments, the cyclone separator
times quantity
(g) (min) (%) can be implemented in most of the industries to make the
(g) environment safe and clean. Subsequent enhancements in
1 500 2 485 97.00 a cyclone separator, i.e. the performance of separation of
2 500 2 479 95.80 dust can be improved by adding the dust or particle filter
3 500 2 493 98.60 or combined with electrostatic precipitator since the
4 500 2 483 96.60 electric field can increase the efficiency significantly.
5 500 2 488 97.60
Average Efficiency 97.12 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The authors would like to express their gratitude to
Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM), Shah Alam and the
In the second experiment, the ability of cyclone Faculty of Electrical Engineering, UiTM for funding this
separator to separate the different type of dust was tested. project.
Each of the material used comes in different particle size
and weight i.e. flour, sago and red bean. The same REFERENCES
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Fig. 5. Efficiency vs Type of Material line graph

IV. CONCLUSION
In a nutshell, the cyclone separator based on Pareto
optimum design has been completely developed and
tested. The experiments results were found to match
simulation studies. From the experimental results,
differences of cyclone efficiency in the range 0.02% to
5.2% compared to simulations were obtained. The
experiment of 3 different geometry parameter of cyclone
shows that dust removal efficiency increase as the smaller

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