Particulate Removal from Flue gas: Improving the performance of Electrostatic Precipitators
Funding: EU (ECSC 7220–PR/123)
Partners: University of Nottingham (GB), EVN (AT), ENEL (IT), Powergen (UK), Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (GR)
Simtec took part in this project creating a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) model in the Ansys Fluent solver. Custom code was written in User Defined Functions (UDFs), extending the applicability of the solver to handle the electrostatic characteristics inside an ElectroStatic Precipitator (ESP). The model took considered for all the processes involved inside an industrial ESP, namely the fully coupled three coexisting fields of gas flow, particle dynamics and electrostatics. The particulates stream consists usually by small ash particles, dust and other substances that must be removed before the gas flow is evacuated to the atmosphere.
The current potential field was calculated, forming an elliptical region around the wires. Its gradient. Furthermore, the electric strength was found to be concentrated near the wires, while the ion density field shows an appreciable asymmetry with respect to the middle wire, exhibiting a lower value than the left and right ones. The particles start to deviate from their straight paths as they approach the first wire and exhibit successive deflections as they also by the second and third wires. Finally, a detailed parametric analysis was conducted to examine the effect of particle and gas velocity, the particle diameter, the wire electric potential and the wire radius.
Ansys tools: Ansys Fluent
