Wetted wall cyclone — A novel concept

Wetted wall cyclone is based on a novel concept of having a gravity fed water film flowing down along the inner walls of a cyclone. This equipment can be used for simultaneous cooling and cleaning - both particulate and gaseous impurities - of a gas. This work encompassed planning and designing of infrastructural equipment, like orifice meter, venturi feeder, rotary air lock and wetted wall cyclone carrying out intensive experimental work and detailed analysis of data thereof. The particulate matter removal under both dry and wet conditions is studied at different air velocities. Experiments were performed by introducing fly ash and talc as pollutants. The overall and grade efficiencies have been obtained under both dry and wet conditions at varying inlet velocity at constant solid loading. Wetting the cyclone walls increased the overall collection efficiency marginally by about 2% when talc was used as the contaminant. However, analysing the grade efficiency data showed a marked improvement of up to 33% in the collection efficiency for fine particles in the range of 1 to 3 μm.