Dust cyclone research leading to more efficient designs has helped the cotton ginning industry comply with increasingly stringent air quality standards governing particulate emissions. An increase in energy prices motivates research leading to equally effective particle collection designs and operating strategies that use less fan power, while the possibility of future changes in regulation motivates research leading to additional improvements in particle collection. A review of the literature was undertaken to discover recent particulate control technology developments in other industries that may benefit the ginning industry. This inter-disciplinary literature review summarizes dust cyclone designs, algebraic and computer models and recent experiments. As computing costs have decreased and model sophistication has increased, the use of computational fluid dynamics to model cyclone performance has grown. There will, however, always be a need for empirical validation in the laboratory and field. Energy cost related to cyclone pressure drop has been and will continue to be an important consideration.
