Experimental Investigation On Separation Performance And Flow Resistance Of Wire-Mesh Mist Eliminator

Wire-mesh mist eliminators are widely used for petroleum, chemical and gas industries to remove small liquid droplets from gas streams, thus to reduce the back-mixing caused by entrainment to improve the efficiency and performance of operations such as purification of exhaust gas, reduction of atmospheric pollution and so on. In various types of commercial gas-liquid separator, wire-mesh mist eliminator is the mostly applied gas-liquid separator due to its simple structure, small volume, high separation efficiency, small resistance, light weight, easy installation, operation and maintenance. However, the wire-mesh mist eliminator has not been sufficiently investigated, especially experimental study has seldom reported, and its design relies heavily on experience.In the present work, an experimental system for separation performance and flow resistance study of the wire-mesh mist eliminator is designed and built. The experiments were carried out with air-water system at ambient temperature on the performance and pressure drop of the wire-mesh mist eliminator. Based on the experimental results, a mathematical model or the separation efficiency and a formula to compute the pressure drop are proposed. In the experiments, the depend of the variations of the separation efficiency and pressure drop on the bed height, wire diameter, specific surface of the wire-mesh mist eliminator and the gas velocity are systematically investigated. The gas velocities used in the experiments are selected such that they are usually encountered in industrial practice. The influences of the above mentioned parameters on the separation performance and pressure drop are analyzed and then a mathematical model for the separation efficiency and a formula for computing the pressure drop are proposed, and the model parameters are obtained by correlation with experimental data.The experiments and the analysis indicate: at a same gas flow rate, separation efficiency and flow resistance of the wire-mesh mist eliminator decreases with the increase of the wire diameter; with the increase in the height of the eliminator bed, the resistance to flow is increased but the separation efficiency is improved; for a fixed wire diameter and bed height, the increase in the specific surface area may lead to the increase of the separation efficiency and the increase of the pressure drop as well. Good agreements can be found in the comparisons between the experimental data and the model predicted results on the separation efficiency and the pressure droop respectively.