The purposes of this study are to develop a swirl flow separator to remove fine seaweeds from wastewater drained from each process of seaweed production and to clarify the design guideline. In this study, as forcus on removal of fine seaweed deposited on the channels, separation of smaller seaweed particles from seaweed waste water have been tried by using cylindrical swirl flow with some ingenuities. In this report, the characteristics of the swirl flow separator with some kinds of rotational vanes on flow rate fraction of the wastewater containing seaweeds have been experimentally investigated. The test fluid was quasi-seaweed wastewater including fine seaweeds made of commercial dried seaweed sheets and tap water. The swirl flow generator was composed of a vertical inner circular pipe of 40 mm i.d and outer one of 120 mm i.d. The separation section was made of a cylindrical stainless steel mesh having same i.d. of the swirl flow generator and 120 mm in length. In the experiment, the range of total flow rate at two inlet pipes of 13 mm i.d. was 10 l/min to 50 l/min, it corresponded to the range of the mean velocity of 0.8 m/s to 3.1 m/s at the inlet pipe. The details of the experimental results and the tendencies on each parameter, such as total volumetric flow rate, number of rotation and the configuration of the rotational vane are presented and discussed in this paper.
TSUBONE et al. (Wed,) studied this question.