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Design of wetted wall bioaerosol concentration cyclones

A wetted wall cyclone is a device that delivers hydrosol in a single stage from
which real-time detection of airborne particles can be readily achieved. This dissertation
presents the design, development, and characterization of a family of wetted wall
bioaerosol cyclone concentrators that consume very low power and are capable of
delivering very small liquid effluent flow rate of highly-concentrated hydrosol. The
aerosol-to-aerosol penetration cutpoint for the cyclones is about 1µm. The aerosol-tohydrosol
collection efficiency for the 1250 L/min cyclone is above 90% for particle sizes
greater than 2 µm at the 1 mL/min liquid effluent flow rate. The aerosol-to-hydrosol
collection efficiency for the 100 L/min cyclone is above 85% for particle sizes larger than
2 µm at the 0.1 mL/min liquid effluent flow rate when it is operated at air flow-rate of
100 L/min. The pressure drop across the 1250 L/min and 100 L/min cyclones are
approximately 22 inches of water and about 6.4 inches of water, respectively.
A study, based on the empirically obtained aerosol-to-aerosol collection
efficiency, was conducted to develop a performance modeling correlation that enables
prediction of the aerosol performance as a function of the Reynolds number and Stokes
number. Since the Reynolds number and Stokes number govern the particle motions in
the cyclone, the aerosol performance could be expressed in terms of the Reynolds number and Stokes number. By testing the three cyclones (100, 300, and 1250 L/min cyclones)
with several different air flow rates, the aerosol-to-aerosol collection efficiencies for wide
range of the Reynolds numbers (3,500 < Re < 30,000) were able to be obtained.
Performance modeling correlations for wetted wall cyclones show that the aerosol-toaerosol
collection efficiency in the cyclone can be well predicted by the Reynolds
number and Stokes number.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/148442
Date14 March 2013
CreatorsSeo, Youngjin
ContributorsMcFarland, Andrew R
Source SetsTexas A and M University
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis, text
Formatapplication/pdf

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