Solid bowl centrifuges such as decanting or tubular centrifuges are widely used in the chemical and pharmaceutical industry, food and biotechnology, minerals processing or wastewater treatment to separate dispersed particles from a continuous liquid phase. The design of those machines is based on simplified stationary black-box models which do not consider the physical behaviour of the separation process as well as the sediment build-up. Thus, the design and scale-up are not possible without countless pilot-scale experiments. However, this is very time consuming and costly. The advantage of dynamic modeling of solid bowl centrifuge is to significantly reduce service life and react quickly to product fluctuations. The resulting process intensification goes hand in hand with increased productivity coupled with reduced energy requirements and overall costs.

This work presents strategies for dynamic modeling of decanting and tubular centrifuges to forecast the separation process and the mechanical dewatering of incompressible and compressible sediments.