Separating the cold and hot air by using the principles of the vortex tube can be applied to industrial applications such as cooling equipment in CNC machines, heating processes, cooling suits, refrigerators etc. The vortex tube is well-suited for these applications because it is simple with no moving parts, quiet, compact, and does not use refrigerants. This study is devoted to the development and testing of an automated vortex tube that can meet the demands of time variant applications such as spot cooling during welding. This is achieved with the help of a moving blockage cone at hot end and orifice area controller at cold end. The performance of a counter-flow vortex tube is validated by comparing the results obtained from the present work with the literature. © 2016, Industrial Research Institute for Automation and Measurements. All rights reserved.