In ancient China, people tied a clay pot with one end of a rope, held the other end of the rope with their hands, and rotated and shook the clay pot to produce centrifugal force to squeeze out the juice of berries in the clay pot, which was the early application of the principle of centrifugal separation.

Industrial centrifuges were born in Europe, for example, in the middle of19th century, three-legged centrifuges for textile dehydration and overhead centrifuges for separating crystallized sugar in sugar factories appeared successively. These earliest centrifuges all operated intermittently and discharged slag manually.

Due to the improvement of the slag unloading mechanism, centrifuges with continuous operation appeared in the 1930s, and centrifuges with intermittent operation also developed due to the realization of automatic control.

1879, Laval of Sweden invented the first separator for separating cream from milk, and its drum was just a hollow cylinder. Later, the conical disks stacked axially in the cylinder were added, which significantly improved the separation effect and improved the processing capacity. This technical progress has led to the rapid development of disc separator. The rotating speed of the centrifugal separator gradually developed from low speed to high speed, and the diameter of the drum gradually increased, which improved the separation effect and improved the processing capacity.

The research and development trends of centrifugal separator are: ① strengthening separation performance, including increasing drum speed; Adding a new driving force in the centrifugal separation process; Speed up the slag pushing speed; Increasing the length of the drum will prolong the time of centrifugal sedimentation and separation. (2) To develop large-scale centrifugal separators, mainly by increasing the drum diameter and using double-sided drums to improve the processing capacity, so as to reduce the equipment investment, energy consumption and maintenance costs for processing unit volume materials. ③ Improve the slag discharging mechanism to make the operation continuous. ④ Add special and combined drum centrifuges to meet special and various separation requirements. ⑤ In theoretical research, the fluid flow in the drum and the formation mechanism of filter residue are mainly studied, and the calculation method of minimum separation degree and treatment capacity is studied. Study on stress distribution and strength calculation of complex cylinder. ⑥ Study the optimal control technology of centrifugal separation process.