AAAR 32nd Annual Conference
September 30 - October 4, 2013
Oregon Convention Center
Portland, Oregon, USA
Abstract View
Performance Evaluation of Miniature Cyclones with Multiple Inlets
DI LIU, Da-Ren Chen, Virginia Commonwealth University
Abstract Number: 218 Working Group: Instrumentation and Methods
Abstract The adverse heath effect of ultrafine particles reported in recent epidemiological studies leads to the high demand of compact particle detectors for spatial or personal monitoring of ultrafine particles. However, large particles in the sampling stream have to be removed in order to keep the proper performance of these detectors. Size-selective inlets are thus needed for compact detectors. Cyclones and impactors are examples of such size selective inlets. To reduce the particle cutoff sizes of cyclones, ones often operate them either at a high flow rate or use the feature of multiple inlets. Operating at a high flow rate often results in the increase of the pressure drop across a cyclone, which is undesirable for compact detectors with limited air pumping power. Meanwhile, multi-inlet cyclones may have the potential to minimize the sampling issues often encountered in a single inlet cyclone, because of variation of ambient wind orientation.
In this study, we design a set of miniature tangential cyclones with different numbers of inlet (i.e., single-, dual- and quarto-inlets). The performance of these cyclones was evaluated at different operational flow rates. The pressure drop and cutoff sizes of these cyclones were measured. The result of this study will be presented in the conference.