AAAR 32nd Annual Conference
September 30 - October 4, 2013
Oregon Convention Center
Portland, Oregon, USA
Abstract View
Behavior of Fibrous Filter Media Loaded with Agglomerate Particles
QISHENG OU, David Y. H. Pui, Da-Ren Chen, Washington University in St. Louis
Abstract Number: 312 Working Group: Control Technology
Abstract Filtration is considered as the most economical control technique to effectively remove airborne particles. Many studies have been performed and published to investigate the filtration behavior of filter media under the particle loading. Most of these studies assume that particles under investigation are spherical in shape. In real world, agglomerate particles are often encountered, especially for those generated from combustion sources. It is believed that the particle morphology is one of the factors that may influence the behavior of particle filtration. Fundamental investigation on the filtration of agglomerate particles is however limited in the literature.
The behavior of fibrous filter media loaded with agglomerate particles, especially in the depth and transition phases, was investigated in this study. Based on the existed model proposed by Thomas and his co-workers for spherical particle loading, a revised model was proposed to estimate the filter loading behavior for agglomerate particles, providing the better prediction in penetration evolution in the loading process. By introducing the equivalent interception length of agglomerate particles into the proposed model, the depth and transition loading behavior of filters for agglomerate particles can be better predicted. The newly proposed model was further verified by the loading experiments on three fiberglass filter media. Testing agglomerate particles with the fractal dimension of ~1.8 and ~1.0 were produced by a diffusion burner via the use of different precursors. The time evolution of both pressure drop and particle penetration efficiency was measured during the loading process. Reasonably good agreement was found between the model calculation and the experimental data. The detail of this work will be presented in this talk.