Application and comparison of technologies based on agglomeration processes

Abstract

Ambient air quality is considered one of the indicators of a sustainable lifestyle. However, traditional cleaning technologies based on gravitational, centrifugal, electrostatic, and other operating principles are ineffective in removing ultrafine solid particles (up to 1 μm) harmful to humans from the gas flow. These fine particle pollutants, which are harmful to both humans and the environment, can be addressed through acoustic or electric field agglomeration. During agglomeration, fine particles combine into larger, single particles that can be effectively filtered by traditional cleaning technologies. Agglomeration is used in various industries to transform dust fractions or difficult-to-process materials into a more manageable form. The work analyzes the most harmful solid particles with sizes ranging from 200 nm to 10 μm. It also explores various ways of using agglomeration techniques to treat the primary gas stream before cleaning, thereby affecting the fine particles in the gas stream. Based on world literature, selected acoustic and electric field agglomeration technologies are discussed.