Design, Fabrication and Testing Of Hydrocyclone Separator as Sediment Separation System

Abstract

Hydrocyclone is a simple mechanical device, with no moving parts, where solid particles are separated from liquid with very little head loss. As its name describes, it uses a cyclone or tangential injection flow process enhancing the centrifugal forces and moving solids outwards. The dispersed particles, move downwards in a spiral path into an underflow chamber, while clean liquid move upwards to the center of the spiral, towards the top outlet. In this way, sand and other particles get separated from the water. Due to the various types of sediments in the water the mechanical parts of the turbine are damaged. Mainly sediments which are hard and have sharp edges cause the most damage according to research the most damage is caused to the turbine blade by these sediments such problems arise due to varying climate and terrain of Nepal. This problem of erosion of mechanical part due to sediments has become a global maintenance problem of hydropower plants. This is natural phenomena so it can neither be controlled or completely stopped but it can be managed. So that we used this project as model for protecting turbine blades. The model is designed for the removal of sediments of size around 48microns and larger sizes from sedimental water. The model is designed with combination of 16° cone angles and 0.027, 0.027 and 0.010m inlet, overflow, underflow cylinder diameters. The hydrocyclone is fabricated with 1.6mm thick mild steel sheet. The initial water sand mixture is compared with the resulting underflow and overflow.