A high efficiency particulate air filter based on agglomerated carbon nanotube fluidized bed

Fluidized bed filtration is a promising technique to remove particles from gas stream. In this work, a fluidized bed filter with agglomerated carbon nanotubes (CNTs) as bed materials is employed to filtrate aerosol particles and its filtration performance is investigated. The aerosol filtration efficiency of fluidized bed filters is found to highly depend on the fluidization state of the filter media. Agglomerate particulate fluidization brings much higher efficiency than agglomerate bubbling fluidization (ABF). Due to the effect of bubbles and the abrasion of fluidizing media in ABF, there are a growing number of nanoparticles releasing from the bed with the increase of gas velocity. The filtration performance of fluidized bed filters with agglomerated CNTs as the media is compared with that of packed bed filters with the same media. It is found that the former provides much lower resistance and obvious higher quality factor than the latter. The filtration efficiency of fluidized bed filter increases with the increase of the static bed height. Our results show that agglomerated CNTs could be employed as media of the fluidized bed which can be used as the high efficiency particulate air filter. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.