March 16, 2020
With lockdown loooming, I figured now was the time to get some proper dust collection so I can knock off some projects while I have the time. I nipped out and grabbed a HEPA filter on Friday just before stores shut down.
I made a Thien cyclone disk separator after looking around the net and reading Phil Thien’s work.
In a conventional cyclone separator you need a fair amount of vertical height to allow the dust to drop down the cone, imagine those huge industrial dust collectors with a big cone on the bottom. A Thien baffle spirals the air in a flat shape from the edge to the center.
The key is the disk is sized to the inside diameter of your vessel, with a 240 degree slot cut out of the outside edge to allow dust / debris to drop out of the air stream, the baffle physically interferes with dust, and debris from trying to get back into the air stream going out of the cylinder and up into the DC and in turn the filter.
The advantage of a Thien-baffle is that it uses up very little vertical height.