Technical Abstract: Dust cyclone research leading to more efficient designs has helped the cotton ginning industry to comply with increasingly stringent air quality regulations governing fine particulate emissions. Future changes in regulations may require additional improvements in dust cyclone efficacy. This inter-disciplinary literature review presents a summary of dust cyclone designs, algebraic and computer models and recent experiments. As more sophisticated computational fluid dynamics has become affordable its use will become more common, but there will always be a need for model validation in the laboratory and field. Another observation expected to continue is the trend to emphasize a balance between collection efficacy and pressure requirements, as energy has become environmentally and economically more expensive.