Development and Performance of Hydrocyclone Separator for Biodiesel Production

Hydrocyclone is an equipment that uses a cyclone or tangential injection flow process with centrifugal forces to separate liquids of different densities. The denser liquid move downwards in a spiral path into an underflow chamber, while clean liquid which is less dense move upwards to the center of the spiral, towards the top outlet. Colman and Thew’s hydrocyclone geometry analysis approached was used in the design and the assumed inlet chamber diameter (D) used for this design was 150 mm and a reducing section length of 1500 mm at a reducing angle of 20°. The capacity of the designed hydrocyclone system in volume is 5.5 liters. The developed machine was tested with 15 liters of palm kernel oil (PKO) as raw material using two different pressures gauge (70 and 80 kPa) and also effect acid concentration (sulphuric acid) at 3 different experimental runs. After the experiments, it was deduced that at constant temperature level, as the pressure rate increases, there is a corresponding increase in the discharge rate at the underflow and overflow outlets where 2.04 minutes and 1.67 minutes were used to separate biodiesel and glycerin under 70 and 80 kPa respectively. Also, it was deduced experimentally that PKO with sulphuric acid gives a higher yield of biodiesel of 47.74% while the one without has 38.49% yield under same experimental and operational conditions.