The procedure usually employed for specifying a set of hydrocyclones used in Newtonian fluid-solid separation processes can be extended to the case of non-Newtonian fluids. The apparent viscosity, µapp, is the link between the two cases, and can be evaluated from the knowledge of the shear stress function, S, and the characteristic rate of shear, λ*. In order to verify the validity of this, experiments using suspensions of different solids in an aqueous solution of carboxymethylcellulose (CMC), with pseudoplastic behavior, in an AKW commercial hydrocyclone have been performed. The results obtained in this work indicated that the separation process and the pressure drop in the hydrocyclone cannot be characterized by a single apparent viscosity associated parameter.
Solid-fluid separation; Hydrocyclone; Non-Newtonian fluid
