NUMERICAL STUDY OF THE FLOW INSIDE A MODULAR BAG FILTER FROM A BIOMASS POWER PLANT

摘要

Nowadays, one of the most important issues in modern industrial power plants is air pollution. Solid particles are harmful to human health and are one of the main pollutants released through the combustion of biomass. The main goal of this paper was to study the flow in a modular bag filter of a dedusting system implemented in a Biomass Power Plant, in order to improve the filtration of the solid particles coming from the biomass combustion. For this purpose, a numerical model using the ANSYS Fluent software was developed. Initially, it was necessary to model the dedusting system in the software SolidWorks. Once this system had 10 modules and to facilitate the simulation in Fluent, only one module was modeled with proper simplifications. Once the geometry was modeled, it was exported to Fluent where the mesh was made, with special care in the inlet of the module, as it is the most critical zone for the simulation. It was simulated 4 cases, where the action of each individual filter was considered. The first case study considered the nominal operating conditions of a biomass power plant. Thereafter, two cases with different mass flow rates were simulated to assess if there were any differences in the flow inside the bag filter. Lastly, it was studied the influence of the vertical baffle size that is in the inlet of the module. Comparing the four simulations, it was concluded that in the first three cases, the flow is very similar, with only a slight increase in the velocity in the study with higher flow, as expected. Furthermore, it was concluded that using a smaller vertical baffle, the flow would be improved, once the filters close to the inlet would be more used.