Erottimia

Erottimia is a Finnish term that broadly refers to devices or methods used to separate components within a system or to distinguish between signals, properties, or data. The core idea is separation based on a differentiating criterion such as size, density, magnetic susceptibility, electrical characteristics, wavelength, or statistical class. Erottimia are employed across fields to increase purity, recover valuable materials, or extract meaningful information.

In industry, erottimia include mechanical separators such as screens and sieves that sort particles by size; magnetic separators that attract ferromagnetic materials; gravity-based separators such as jigs, spirals, and hydrocyclones that exploit density differences; and air or cyclonic separators that use airflow to separate particles by size and density. In chemical engineering, separators like filters, centrifuges, and distillation setups act to separate mixtures into purer streams.

In electronics and data processing, erottimia can denote discriminators or classifiers that separate signals from noise or categorize data into classes. In imaging and spectroscopy, optical erottimia use wavelength-selective elements to separate components of light.

The concept also covers laboratory techniques, such as chromatography and electrophoresis, which separate mixtures based on interaction with a medium or electric field.

These devices are often grouped by the property exploited (size, density, magnetism, wavelength, electrical characteristic).