The 4th International Symposium on Mine Safety Science and Engineering (ISMSSE2018)

258 / 2018-01-08 05:18:48

Experimental and Numerical Evaluation of Pressure Drop Across Flooded-bed Scrubber Screen and Demister

dust,scrubber,CFD,inhalable & respirable dust

Mine occupational health and environmental safety > Dust-proof

Efficiently removing dust from the air at its generation point in an underground coal mine greatly reduces worker exposure to high dust concentrations. In the United States, most continuous miners employ machine-mounted flooded-bed scrubbers to capture and remove dust generated during coal cutting operations. A full-scale model of a flooded-bed scrubber was fabricated, and tests were conducted to measure the pressure drop across the flooded-bed wire-mesh screen and demister (mist eliminator) at different airflow rates in one-phase (dry) and two-phase (wet) conditions. Subsequently, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models of the screen and demister were developed and validated using experimental results. The CFD simulations showed significantly close agreement with experimental results with a maximum of 7% and 19% difference in results for screen and demister, respectively. This paper presents empirical formulas that can be used to predict pressure drop across a flooded-bed screen and demister in wet and dry conditions. Also, the validated CFD models could be used to optimize the design of a demister to achieve maximum efficiency.