CyDesign

History

It all started in 1976 when the CyDesign engineer Dipl. Ing Michael Kaden, then Deputy Project Director and Engineering Manager at the 80 MW IEA Grimethorpe (UK) PFBC experimental facility searched for a gas clean up system to handle flue gases from coal combustion at 850 °C and 10 bar. The gases had to be cleaned to an extent that a commercial gas turbine can be driven by them and combined cycle coal fired power stations can be realised.

With the help of the NCB Coal Utilisation Research Laboratory in Leatherhead and the advice of Prof. Stairmand, a cyclone system was designed which could tackle this difficult specification. Today commercial coal fired combined power stations are available. The first commercial station with a capacity of 135 MWel was build in 1987 by ABB Carbon in Västeras Stockholm Sweden. Many others followed. The CyDesign efforts, however, did not only focus on cyclones for PFBC, but soon covered many different cyclone applications. After supplying cyclone equipment to a wide range of industry, a new research center was opened in Cape Town - South Africa in 1995 to tie up some loose ends with regard to optimising cyclone performance. During the test series, special attention was given to the optimisation of details such as the pressure loss minimisation tests shown on the left. And also extensive on site tests were conducted in various industries such as the test at a glass melting furnace.

In 1996 the first large scale cyclone project with particle agglomeration was completed at a particle board factory. The dry spray agglomeration works in hot gases by injecting a small amount of water droplets, which during their evaporation cycle will accumulate small particles and agglomerate them to a large dry solid particle which is more easily collected by downstream equipment. This technology led to the introduction of dry spray agglomeration systems retrofitted to large scale pant and on the other hand started the development of the patented SprayCone cyclone system consisting of a multicyclone collector with individual evaporative agglomeration sprays. In 1999 a contract was awarded by John Thompson Boilers to us under World Bank financing to provide know how for the design of in-line grid refiring systems to the JINAN boiler company in the Peoples Republic of China. This was our first involvement in the transfer of know how and soon after we concentrated to become a consultant and know how provider in this area. As part of this activity, the development of the CyDesign program started. Today we can offer high performance cyclone systems either turn key or as part of our consultant and licensing activities in a form which best suits the industrial user or the equipment supplier.