Saturation models of oleophilic coalescing filters

Fibrous coalescing filters are widely used in a series of processes such as compressed air purification, engine crankcase ventilation, processing and cutting, and are used to remove liquid aerosol particles in the airflow. Pressure drop and ef?ciency of coalescence filters are greatly affected by saturation. It is of importance to establish the relationship among saturation, filter media parameters and operating conditions, which is helpful to optimize the filter design. Coalescence ?lters composed of thin glass fibrous media with micron fiber diameters are widely used in industry, while the saturation of which cannot be accurately predicted by the existing saturation models. This work investigated the relationship between pressure drop and saturation of multi-layered filters with different oleophilic filter media. In this study, there was no sharp boundary between wetting and non-wetting regions within filter media, thus a filter was regarded as a whole capillary system. According to the Jump-and-Channel model and capillary theory, a saturation model was developed. Compared with a large number of published literature data, it is found that when the saturation value is greater than 0.2, the predicted value is in good agreement with the experimental results, and the relative deviation is ≤20%. With the decrease in saturation, the boundaries become more and more obvious between the wetting and non-wetting regions. In this case, there is no need to modify to the capillary radius in the developed model. However, the developed model was also limited by the need for the channel pressure drop measurement, which should be solved in further work.