| A numerical study was performed to investigate factors that influence pressure drop and flow pattern across pleated air filters. Simulations were done using FLUENT, a commercial available Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) code. The objectives of this work were: first, to develop CFD models for different pleated filter configurations; second, to examine the effect of pleat geometry (shape, height and spacing), approaching air velocity, and filter configuration (panel filters and cylindrical filters) on the flow pattern and pressure drop across the pleated filters; third, to obtain a generalized correlation curve for the design of triangularly pleated air filters; and finally, to develop a three-dimensional CFD model for a multiple panel filter configuration and investigate the dependence of the filter pressure drop and filter medium face velocity distribution on the gap spacing between each panel filter.; Results showed that the pressure drop vs. pleat count per unit length curve has a characteristic U-shape curve for all filter configurations studied. The optimal pleat count (which corresponding to the minimum filter pressure drop) depends on the pleat height, pleat shape, and filter configuration, but not on the approaching velocity. For rectangular pleats, the optimal ratio of the upstream channel spacing to the downstream channel spacing was one. By scaling the inertia and viscous terms in the momentum equation, a generalized correlation curve was obtained for the design of triangularly pleated air filters. For the multiple panel filter configuration, medium face velocity was highly non-uniform along the flow channel; decreasing the gap spacing reduced the average medium face velocity but increased the total filter pressure drop. |
