3D Printed Cyclone Air/Dust Separator

big thanks to brilliant for sponsoring this video a few weeks ago a big truck pulled up next to my house and unloaded a large wooden crate inside that crate was none other than a brand new step craft m1000 cnc router wow i'm super excited about this because now i can cut almost anything i want out of aluminum wood carbon fiber foam and more but this video isn't about what i'm making with the machine it's more about what i'm making for the machine when you cut stuff without a dust collection system sawdust piles up pretty quickly and gets in the air and all over the place so to solve this problem step craft includes a dust collection adapter that attaches around the bit this has a hose that you can connect to your shop vac to suck up all the dust for making wings and other large objects out of foam i'm going to be generating a large volume of dust and if i only use my shop vac to collect it all i'm going to be going through a ton of dust bags and filters which aren't really cheap so to solve this i decided to add a cyclone separator before the vacuum a cyclone separator is a clever device that separates dust and other solids out of the air and collects them in a bucket so the shop vac doesn't fill up as quickly it works by spinning the air around inside of a cone since solids are heavier than air centrifugal force causes them to get flung outwards to the walls and eventually they fall down into the bucket the air is more immune to the centrifugal force than dust so it peels away from the wall and makes a little tornado in the middle that gets sucked up through the top and into the vacuum and no the cyclone separator was not invented by james dyson they've been used in sawmills and for other industrial applications for a long time since cyclone separators are basically just vertical tubes and cones they are super easy to 3d print i decided to try printing my own so i designed this separator that has four little cones in parallel the dirty air enters this hole in the middle and then gets split four ways into the cyclones from there the dust separates out and falls to the bottom and then the clean air goes up through these top tubes and into the vacuum i printed the main body in one big piece and cleaned it all up and removed some support material from the overhanging tubes this lid to the splitter area couldn't be printed as part of the main body because it was overhanging so i glued that on separately next i installed the roofs on all the cones and i wanted to be able to see the inside so i cut one of them out of clear acrylic on the m1000 incredible the other ones were just 3d printed i had to print the top tube combiner and u-joint tube that goes on top of that in two pieces that one had some support material but i cleared that out and glued the two pieces together next i cut holes in a bucket lid and glued the whole thing on top of that then i connected the shop vac and this is what happened ah that's terrible my ear holes were bleeding i think my five horsepower shopvac is a bit too powerful for the small diameter corrugated plastic tube that comes with the step craft the high velocity airflow inside causes a resonance that's just god-awful so i had to figure something else out i tried some slightly larger diameter hose i had but that also resonated then i attached some rigid tube sections on that hoping it would kill the resonance but they only worked a little bit it was even making noise with a little dc brushed motor from a handheld vacuum that i took apart i was actually able to kill the resonance by putting some webbing up the tube but that also reduced airflow quite a bit i eventually ended up getting this larger diameter clear collapsible tube that did not make any noise so then i was able to start cutting some foam wings and test out the new separator at first it seemed like it worked really well eventually a cool spiral shape developed in the cone where you could see where the air was flowing and quite a bit of dust was being collected so that's great at that point i was pretty stoked about designing different types of separators since they were so easy to print so i decided to make a couple more to have a competition to see which design was best the next one i made was just a single cone i also cut its roof out of acrylic to see the inside then i cut a hole in the bucket lid glued a plate to the bottom and screwed the separator on top next i glued the top on and installed some hose adapters and then it was ready to test i designed in these little airfoil wings with the idea that they would help form the cyclone but ended up removing them later anyhow this design also seemed to work pretty well although i think ideally the wall should be a little steeper because some of the bigger heavier things that got sucked up would just orbit around and not fall down into the bucket until the vacuum was shut off here you can see my little airfoils were just being a nuisance so i chopped them off and sanded the nubs down smooth after that it seemed to work about the same but at least nothing was getting stuck in order to see if any dust was getting past the separator i made this little filter that uses a square of toilet paper to catch dust and i installed it between the separator and the vacuum as it was cutting foam after a minute or so there was nothing on the toilet paper so that's a great sign i started printing a larger filter that used a paper towel square instead of toilet paper for more thorough testing anyways it was then time for our third separator and for this i decided to try a diffuser instead of a cyclone the idea here is that any fluid or gas that's moving quickly can support more particulate matter in the flow than when it's moving slowly this is the reason why river deltas get formed all the sediment gets picked up by the fast-moving narrow river and then it gets deposited onto the bottom once the river fans out and slows down same idea here the air would flow into the box and encounter a lot of obstacles and drag as it slowed down the dust particles would drop out into the bucket air would also be able to flow down and around the obstacles but it would still slow down and hopefully drop its particles i printed this and assembled it all together also with a window to see the inside i then also assembled the big paper towel filter so now it was time for the big competition to be able to more easily see the dust in the paper towel filter i used this green dyed cornstarch left over from one of those color festivals i went to like 10 years ago i then powered up the stratus led's 200 watt module and the free fly away of high speed camera connected up all the tubing and started testing the diffuser was up first as you can see by looking into the bucket it clearly worked at least a little bit however when we look at the high speed camera footage it's clear a lot of the dust was getting sucked out the exhaust and into the vacuum upon inspecting the paper towel it was clear that it did not work very well the green was kind of hard to see in the high speed video so i prepared to test with some sawdust that would be more visible [Music] here you can see the intake side it looks like the larger particles fall down while the finer dust flows around the corner on the output side it looked like some dust was coming up from the bottom and some was also coming straight through the diffuser not good but at least it sort of worked there was still quite a bit of green dust that ended up in the bucket next it was time to test the monocyclone with this one the wave camera captured some pretty sweet footage of the dust sticking to the wall and spiraling down there was only the slightest hint of green on the paper towel so this one is clearly pretty dang effective wow oh boy there's just a little tiny bit of green on the edges just a tiny tiny bit diffuser big cyclone next i did some sawdust to be able to see it more clearly this was shot at 1 500 frames per second this next clip shows the intake at 2200 frames per second [Music] and here is the dust sticking to the wall as it spirals down into the bucket and then it flies out of the hole in the top of the bucket lid and settles into the bottom anyways next it was time to test out the four part parallel cyclone the white stuff you see in there is little pieces of acrylic that i had cut earlier and they wouldn't come out because of static unfortunately it's kind of hard to see the green against the blue background after inspecting it more closely with sawdust we can see that it looks like there's dust flowing up out of the bucket i don't know if this was because one of the other cyclones was clogged and too much air was flowing through the bucket or what but this made me think the filter wasn't going to look very great and sure enough it looked like this whoa better than the diffuser box but much worse than the monocyclone there was definitely some green in the bucket though so it sort of worked at this point i could have just been done and stuck with the monocyclone but i was kind of hooked on designing and printing these things so i decided to try and build an even better one while that was printing i decided to mess around and see if these things could be useful for cleaning my floor first i tried the paper towel filter only that was pretty disgusting oh that is gnarly next i tried the mono separator and the filter behind it to see how effective it is this is when i got the idea that the cone angle was not as steep as it should be for bigger chunks they just stayed in orbit i vacuumed an even bigger section of my floor and the filter still had some junk in it but it was clear the cyclone definitely helped a lot there was quite a bit of junk captured in the bucket and it became clear that i needed to vacuum my floor more often moving on my idea for this fourth separator was to do three cyclones in series the dirty air flows into the smallest cyclone through here then out the top and into the second cyclone then once again at the top and into the third cyclone i designed it all in a way that it could be printed as one big part the print took over 24 hours with a 0.8 millimeter nozzle and i still had to print pretty fast and loose so the quality was not that great oh boy after removing it from the print bed i had to sand away some strings and other impurities on the inside then i glued on the outlet and the intake attached it to the bucket lid and gave it a test i was super surprised to find that it didn't work very well at all not only is there green on the filter but there's also crap from in there that went up and then out terrible at first i thought the holes at the bottom might be too big but as i was gluing on these cones to make them smaller i realized what the real problem was but anyhow i still decided to test with the cones and they helped a little bit but not a lot so i think the problem is the air is just going in here down and then up here and out and it's entirely skipping the whole cyclone path so to fix this i put two smaller sub buckets on the second and third cyclones that go into the big bucket this makes sure the air flows in series through all three cyclones here it is moment of truth not bad not really any better than the single cyclone though dang what can you do i got a cool looking piece of plastic this is the second stage and the third stage i'm surprised there's actually more powder in the third stage than there is in the second stage so that means more was making its way through the first stage and through the second stage into the third stage then was just coming out of the second stage alone we don't really know how much came out of the first stage because it all went into there but that's really interesting definitely not any better than the monocyclone with the green powder test but then i decided to give it the old daniel's floor test okay so what's left after cleaning the floor wow almost nothing dang that's really impressive huh so it seems like this one does better with larger particles and like the kind of the kind of stuff you find on my floor but the uh monocyclone does better with super fine particles like dust but then again there's not much dust here either hmm this is strange i'm getting mixed results now there's surprisingly little stuff in the second and third stages here so it seems like the first stage took most of it out and it's all in here since i was getting conflicting results here i went back to test it with some sawdust in the toilet paper filter just a little tiny bit of sawdust on there just like a tiny tiny bit it seems to work pretty well i also tested the monocyclone again and it did seem to work a tiny bit better then i ran the green powder test again with the monocyclone and this time it did not do as well as it did before not sure why but it was still a tiny bit better than the new series cyclone so that concludes all the testing i did the final result seems to be that the monocyclone works better for fine dust and the series cyclone works better for big dust so far i've cut quite a few things on the stepcraft m1000 i was mainly only using the monocyclone for that and it's collected quite a bit of foam so that's [Music] the dust great the cyclone makes me wanna see and see all night long going hard when i turn the shop back on and it moves that just like a cyclone just like a cyclone i have some ideas for potentially improving the cyclone separator that i'd like to try out in the future let me know if you liked this video and would like to see more of these i'm looking forward to making videos about the stuff i've made with this machine but that's a topic for a future video if you found these cyclone separators interesting then i can guarantee that you would love the science technology engineering and math courses that are offered by brilliant brilliant aims to create a culture of learning around inquiry curiosity 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everyday life join the millions of people already learning on brilliant with a special offer just for my viewers head to brilliant.org rc test flight to get started with brilliant interactive lessons the first 200 viewers will also get 20 off an annual membership thanks again to brilliant for sponsoring this video that's all for now thanks for watching bye

Channel: rctestflight

Views: 304,858

Keywords: cyclone, separator, diy, 3D printed, CNC

Id: 50UtHTSGE24

Length: 14min 47sec (887 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 04 2021