Abstract
Currently, controlling the pollution emission is increasingly challenging, whether due to the severity of environmental legislation or the need to collect dry material to return to production. Among the many existing equipment for the control of atmospheric emissions, the fabric filters have been diffused in the industrial environment mainly for their cost-benefit ratio. However, although the fabric filter has a high dry particulate collection efficiency, some challenges in the optimization of this equipment need to be worked on, mainly in relation to the design of new filters or upscaling the existing ones, which is expensive and costly to perform experimentally. The present study considered a small fabric filter at industrial scale: 5.3 m high; 1.8 m deep; 2.0 m wide. The Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) was sought to obtain a better understanding of its flow field considering the inclusion of solid and perforated bulkheads in three inlet configurations (conventional feed, triple lower feed and triple concentric feed). It was observed that the bulkheads set-up promotes a better distribution of the flow through the sleeves, quantified by an average velocity reduction of 19 % for the solid bulkhead and 47 % reduction for the perforated bulkhead. Other variables, such as the mass flow rate and pressure over the bags, showed a similar behavior. Focusing the layout influence, it is highlighted that the triple lower feed showed the best flow distribution among the bags, highlighting the best performance with the perforated bulkhead, behavior which was also observed in the other configurations. With a qualitative perspective of better flow distribution, the decrease at the average velocity through the sleeves allows the association to the bags wear reduction; outstanding the importance of flow field understanding at project and optimization of fabric filters.
