A critical review of dense medium cyclone models

摘要

Dense medium cyclones (DMC) are the most important unit operation in a coal cleaning circuit. It is essential that appropriate design and operating variables levels are identified to achieve optimum performance from DMC for a given feed coal characteristics. Mathematical modelling can be used as an effective tool to optimise the performance of DMC operation. In this context, mathematical models to describe the DMC performance available in the literature are reviewed. It has been noted that the feed coal characteristics are not considered in the existing models resulting in limited application. A new modelling strategy has been proposed to build robust DMC model by incorporating the washability index as a variable.