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Fibre fractionation using air‐sparged hydrocyclone
Author(s) -
Dabros Michal,
Afacan Artin,
Masliyah Jacob H.
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
the canadian journal of chemical engineering
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.404
H-Index - 67
eISSN - 1939-019X
pISSN - 0008-4034
DOI - 10.1002/cjce.20119
Subject(s) - hydrocyclone , arithmetic underflow , fractionation , pulp (tooth) , volumetric flow rate , pulp and paper industry , chemistry , chromatography , environmental science , engineering , medicine , physics , classical mechanics , pathology , quantum mechanics , computer science , programming language
Fractionation of mechanical wood pulp into two or more streams on the basis of fibre length has been investigated to recover valuable long fibres from virgin or recycled wood pulp. An air‐sparged hydrocyclone was used to fractionate the pulp at feed mass concentrations (consistencies) of 0.15% and 0.30%. The extent of fibre fractionation, as affected by feed flow rate, air flow rate, ratio of overflow to underflow rates, was studied. As well, the effects of pore size of the air sparger and cyclone length are presented. It was found that at low consistencies of the pulp feed, the overflow stream from the hydrocyclone had a significantly longer average fibre length than that of the feed pulp. The feed pulp consistency, feed flow rate, air flow rate and the ratio of overflow to underflow flow rates had a direct effect on the fractionation performance.