Numerical study of the movement of fine particle in sound wave field

Inhalable particulate matter, especially PM2.5 is one of the main pollutants in China and it's harmful to both human health and atmosphere. Since the removal efficiency of traditional dust removal devices such as ESP for PM2.5 is very low, pretreatment becomes necessary before the dust gets into the dust remover. Acoustic agglomeration is one of the pretreatment technologies which uses sound wave with high intensity to make fine particles get agglomerate and grow up, and improves the efficiency of traditional dust removal devices for PM2.5. In sound wave field, fine particles are carried by the medium which in this paper is air, and vibrate with different amplitude because of different particle sizes, thus relative movement appears and then particles have more chances to collide and get agglomerate. In this paper, the movement of particles with different sizes in travelling wave sound field and standing wave sound field were calculated, including the velocity, displacement, amplitude and so on. The situation that Re<1 was considered and Viscous force in Stokes region was chose as the main forces here. Studying the movement of fine particle in sound field with different conditions has great meaning in learning the mechanisms of acoustic agglomeration. (C) 2015 Published by Elsevier Ltd.