Recent developments in centrifuge technology

Centrifugation represents one of the main groups of mechanical particle-liquid separation processes. There are available various centrifuges for sedimentation and filtration, which are operating continuously or discontinuously. The tasks for centrifugal separation are very wide spread from liquid clarification and purification, particle thickening, solids demoistening, particle fractionating and sorting, solids washing, liquid-liquid separation to extraction of solids or liquids. Applications of centrifuges can be found in all kinds of industry, in environmental protection, water treatment, etc. In the centrifugal field mass forces are present during the separation process. This leads to specific advantages and disadvantages in comparison to competing separation processes. Research and development for centrifugal processes today has not coming to an end but several new ideas to use centrifugal forces for separation and new technical developments in this field can be observed. After description of some fundamentals and presentation of an overview of the technical variations some aspects of advantages and disadvantages of centrifuges in comparison to other separation techniques are discussed and examples for recent research and technical development as well as actual trends in the field of centrifugation are given.