A novel turbulent aggregation device for flue gas

The purpose of this study is to construct a turbulent aggregation device which has specific performance for fine particle aggregation in flue gas. The device consists of two cylindrical pipes and an array of vanes. The pipes extending fully and normal to the gas stream induce large scale turbulence in the form of vortices, while the vanes downstream a certain distance from the pipes induce small one. The process of turbulent aggregation was numerically simulated by coupling the Eulerian multiphase model and population balance model together with a proposed aggregation kernel function taking the size and inertia of particles into account, and based on data of particles' size distribution measured from the flue of one power plant. The results show that the large scale turbulence generated by pipes favours the aggregation of smaller particles (smaller than 1μm) notably, while the small scale turbulence benefits the aggregation of bigger particles (larger than 1μm) notably and enhances the uniformity of particle size distribution among different particle groups.