Effect of the secondary flow in the separation of heavy metals in a spiral trough

This paper reports the results of the experimental investigation carried out to evaluate the effect of the secondary flow in the separation of lead content in a mixture of water and sediments, using a spiral trough of FLG cross section, with internal radio of 0.025m and an external radio of 0.15m and a pitch of 0.185m. To establish the experimental procedure it was resorted to the method of the dimensional analysis and the randomized factorial design of experiments, being obtained with this design a total of 16 experimental data. The studied answer variables were the concentration of lead in the unload, the partition of water, the removal of sediments and the removal of lead, which depend of parameters non dimensional like Dean's number, relation of radios and the average drag coefficient that it includes the effect of the particles size. With the experimental data the author has obtained empiric equations by means of multiple lineal regression for each one of the responses variables.