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ARS Home » Plains Area » Las Cruces, New Mexico » Cotton Ginning Research » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #150891
Title: EVALUATING AN ON-LINE DUST CYCLONE PERFORMANCE MONITOR

Author
item Funk, Paul
item Baker, Kevin
item Hughs, Sidney
item Holt, Gregory

Submitted to: International Conference on Air Pollution from Agricultural Operations
Publication Type: Proceedings
Publication Acceptance Date: 12/15/2002
Publication Date: 10/12/2003
Citation: FUNK, P.A., BAKER, K.D., HUGHS, S.E., HOLT, G.A. 2003. EVALUATING AN ON-LINE DUST CYCLONE PERFORMANCE MONITOR. INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON AIR POLLUTION FROM AGRICULTURAL OPERATIONS-III. P. 40-44.

Interpretive Summary: Dust cyclones are used to reduce emissions from cotton gins and other agricultural processing businesses. Developing better cyclones to comply with increasingly stringent air quality regulations requires extensive laboratory testing of many dust cyclone designs. This paper reports on research evaluating an alternative means of measuring dust emissions in the laboratory. While the new technology promises to save time and money when compared with present methodology, the desired accuracy was not realized. The equipment as tested had an uncertainty of 15%, while the uncertainty associated with present methods for measuring dust cyclone performance is seldom more than 5%. Dust comes in different sizes and different size distributions. The new technology still needs to be evaluated with other types of dust.

Technical Abstract: Laboratory experiments on cyclone designs and operating parameters using EPA Reference Method 201A is labor intensive. The intent of this experiment was to evaluate an electronic particulate monitor as an alternative dust cyclone performance measurement instrument. The particulate monitor was installed in line with fiberglass filters that captured dust escaping from test cyclones. Mass on the filters was compared to particulate monitor output. Three cyclones, four loading rates and four replicates were run in random order. A linear correlation of about 85% was observed when data was separated by cyclone size. Cost and time savings are promising, but dust loading across a range of varous particle size distributions still needs to be evaluated.