Improvement and modelling of the knelson concentrator

Abstract EN

The Knelson concentrator is a centrifugal separator which was originally and successfully designed for extracting free gold particles.

Despite of its wide range of applications, the exact concentration mechanism of the device is not fully understood.

The purpose of this research was to determine the optimum parameters and improve the performance of knelson concentrator by investigating the effects of artificial porous beds and pulsed water jackets on the performance of the device.

Artificial bed consists of glass beads of range 1.5-2 mm diameter have been used.

It was found that two techniques can improve the performance of the batch Knelson concentrator.

The experimental work showed that improvement ratio of concentrator was increased about 1.55 for flow rate 8 l / m compared with no bed for the same flow rate.

In addition, the improvement ratio was increased about 1.25 when pulsed water was used.

A nother purpose of this work was to develop mathematical model approaches to understand the fundamental mechanism of the Knelson concentrator.

In addition, two mathematical model of the Knelson concentrator have been developed.