Transversal pressure effect in circulative separators

Progressive urban development of the human environment requires new methods of rain water treatment. Recently, there has been a growing interest in the improvement of gravitational suspension separation, and especially in the application of the centrifugal force. This important factor can be induced in two ways; by the circulation of the reservoir containing the fluid (centrifugal separators), or by a tangent supply of this reservoir (circulative separators). In addition to the centrifugal force, another essential transversal force is at work in this case, resulting from the local variability of the pressure. In the literature, this force is derived for centrifuge conditions, but applied also to circulative separators, which is questionable, as in the latter devices velocity and pressure fields are clearly different. The paper is devoted to the determination of the transversal pressure effect in circulative separators. First, a model of tangent and radial velocity profiles is introduced. The radial pressure distribution, calculated on this basis and verified experimentally, leads to the final result, that is, a technical formula describing the force in question.