Research on enhancing separation of ultra-fine droplets using turbulators between adjacent demister plates in WFGD systems

To enhance the performance of demister applied in wet flue gas desulphurization systems, flow turbulators are equipped between adjacent plates to reconstruct flow field. Both experimental and numerical approaches are employed to investigate the influence of various kinds of turbulator configurations upon removal of droplets within the range of 5–50 μm obeying Rosin-Rammler distribution. Turbulators including spoiler, square column, concave groove, perforated concave groove, and triangular and cylinder columns are compared, among which spoiler provided the highest overall efficiency while square column yields the best graded efficiency for 5 μm droplets group. Furthermore, moving the spoiler towards the core region of the demister ducts received better performance due to augmented interaction between spoiler and drainage channels, which performed an essential role in droplets collection. Based on this knowledge, spoilers are optimized by changing their angle of attack and size; the result is positive since overall separation efficiency can be improved to 100%, along with graded efficiencies for 10 and 5 μm groups achieving 95.97% and 27.26%, respectively, much higher than those of baseline demister without turbulators. This study indicates that inertial-based demisters have great potential in separating ultra-fine droplets through reorganizing turbulence field, thus extra system loss can be avoided by abandoning additional filter components.