The influence of the fabric filter layout of in a flow mass filtrate

Nowadays, more and more companies are forced to control particulate emissions to the atmosphere, due to economic reasons, legal aspects or simply the change in policy that favors ecological commitment. This new trend induces the necessity for better particle capture equipment and has made the environmental control equipment market increase by 20% in the last few years (Rocha et al., 2012). The dry capture of fine particles is carried out by filtration, and the fabric filter has become a very popular equipment because of its high efficiency and low operational cost. In the other hand, this efficiency is dependent upon proper design and layout, and the particle filter interactions greatly influence the filtration results and the overall efficiency. In this context, this article presents the computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulation of the airflow inside an industrial fabric filter with a set of 49 bags and a total surface area of 75 m(2). The simulations were performed using the ANSYS FLUENT v13.0. This package applies the Finite Volumes Method, using the URANS approach, as well as the realizable k-epsilon model for the turbulence and the SIMPLE algorithm for the pressure velocity coupling (Miltner et al., 2015). Four inlet positions were analyzed in order to determine how the internal flow profile and the equipment filtering performance depends on the inlet position. The simulations allowed concluding that the simple and double inverted feed positions led to a more satisfactory flow, considering not only the overall efficiency but also the bag's useful lifespan. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.