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Electrostatic precipitators (ESPs) belong to the most efficient devices for control of particle emissions in the process industry and environmental technologies in general. The operating principle of ESPs, relying on particle precipitation by electrical charging, leads to an enhanced turbulent motion by electrohydrodynamic (EHD) effects within the gaseous working fluid passing through the ESP. This enhanced turbulence is generally considered detrimental to the separation efficiency, because the additional shear forces acting on the collection electrodes promote re-entrainment of already precipitated particles. Further, the enhanced turbulent cross mixing diminishes the transport of charged particles by electric forces directed towards the collection electrodes. In other industrial applications however, many process units that are based on heat or mass transport would benefit from enhanced turbulent mixing. These include heat exchangers for energy recuperation or evaporation and absorption units such as flue gas scrubbers. A combination of these with an ESP possibly allows for versatile new applications in the process industry.
The motivation of this thesis is to study the effects of electrohydrodynamically generated motions onto the turbulent cross mixing within gaseous flows over a wide parameter space including variations in geometry and operating conditions. In order to do so, the influence of EHD effects on the three major transport properties, i.e. thermal energy, mass and momentum, were experimentally investigated. Based on analogies caused by similar transport mechanisms, the experimental results were compared despite different methods being used. In order to help with the comparison a simplified eddy viscosity model is applied.
The study for each transport property was conducted with a different setup of a tube type ESP. These setups include axial and radial pressure drop measurements to quantify the momentum transport, a self-built local heat transfer sensor to determine heat transfer coefficients and a wetted wall-column to study the enhancement of mass transport phenomena. Experiments on momentum and heat transport include a large variation of different geometries and operating variables such as discharge electrode design, tube diameter, flow velocity, as well as magnitude and polarity of operating voltage. In addition, selected measurements with aerosol particles were conducted, to gain additional insights on the effects of EHD induced turbulence generation by particle bound space charge compared to ion bound space charge in clean gas flows.
The results do not only provide transport coefficients for the hands-on application by plant designers, but also feature numerous experimental data that can be used as reference values for ongoing research in the numerical simulation of electrohydrodynamically enhanced flow and therefore significantly increase the available amount of data provided by current literature.
This thesis is an attempt to assess some of the effects that electroquasistatic body forces exert on turbulent internally forced convective flows. In order to do that, a stochastic turbulence model is employed, namely, the One-Dimensional Turbulence (ODT) model.
The reduced dimensionality of ODT demands a reduction of the Navier-Stokes equations (and in this case, also the Maxwell equations), into a 1-D system. This is done by performing an asymptotic analysis in terms of the nondimensional numbers of the flow. Also, a validation step due to the relative novel character of the cylindrical ODT formulation is done for an incompressible and constant properties flow regime and a variable density flow regime. The validation is presented for both the temporal (T-ODT) and a novel spatial (S-ODT) formulation in both planar and cylindrical geometries. Results in the constant property case show that wall normal (and radial) profiles, in both the T-ODT and S-ODT formulations, show good agreement with each other and to the data of Direct Numerical Simulations (DNSs). For the evaluated variable density heated pipe flow, gradients at the wall can be better reproduced with S-ODT.
After validating the model, ODT is applied first into a planar configuration which emulates the flow in a wire-plate Electrostatic Precipitator (ESP). For this flow, the additional input energy due to the electroquasistatic body force has an effect on the modification of the bulk velocity, and subsequently, the skin friction coefficient. Some qualitative DNS trends are confirmed with ODT, such as the localized increase of the Reynolds stress, as a consequence of increased eddy activity close to the discharge electrodes. Next, the results of ODT simulations in a cylindrical wire-tube ESP are presented. Here, ODT results are compared to experimental results. ODT results for global integral quantities such as the streamwise pressure gradient and the Nusselt number enhancement ratio are able to match in a reasonable way the experimental results. The competing relevance between the EHD contribution to turbulence by momentum, and by affecting the temperature and density due to the Joule heating effect is also analyzed, showing the leading order relevance of the former one. Specifically for the Nusselt number results, the sensitivity of the EHD flow to transition effects is shown to be very significant.
This thesis may open the door to a vast new field of phenomena which can not only serve for the further validation of the ODT model against DNSs or experiments, but also for the real use of ODT in applications which are so far inaccessible for traditional DNSs.