Acoustic Agglomeration of Power Plant Fly Ash for Environmental and Hot Gas Clean-up

Abstract

Acoustic agglomeration of power plant fly ash is an intermediate treatment of the flue gases to increase the size of the small micron (1–5) and submicron (0.1–1) particulates to large micron sizes (5–10) so that the conventional particle removal devices such as bag houses, electrostatic precipitators, and scrubbers can operate more efficiently. This paper provides a brief history of the topic, introduces some of the fundamental issues and gives some recent results of analytical models of the processes. The experimental facility is briefly described and some analytical results are shown which compare well with the experimental results. Most important of all, the paper shows that acoustic agglomeration is a technically and potentially economically viable method to improve air pollution control.