Permeability modeling of fibrous media with bimodal fiber size distribution

P.C. Gervais (1) , N. Bardin-Monnier (1) , D. Thomas (1)

1 LRGP - Laboratoire Réactions et Génie des Procédés

Fibrous media as aerosol filtration devices are widely used in many industrial applications and present a wide variety of features like the fiber composition, the solid volume fraction, the fiber diameter distribution and the fiber orientation. Among them are nonwovens materials, which are mostly composed of fibers blends. The two main characteristics of these filters are the filtration efficiency and the pressure drop. These properties depend on the filter thickness, the face velocity, the fluid viscosity, etc. Recently, predictive expressions for bimodal media have been developed based on the combination of unimodal equivalent radius models and dimensionless permeability. The main contribution of this work is to propose combinations for a wide range of realistic fibrous filters in addition to experimental validation. The building of a universal model to predict the permeability of bimodal fibrous media for a wide range of solid volume fraction, α and fiber diameter ratio, R is envisaged. Therefore our approach has been to test different analytical correlations for 0.05<α<0.2 and 2

Mots clés: Bimodal fibrous media; Filtration; Permeability modeling; Flow simulation; GeoDict; Nonwoven

Domaines: Génie des procédés

P.C. Gervais, N. Bardin-Monnier, D. Thomas. Permeability modeling of fibrous media with bimodal fiber size distribution. Chemical Engineering Science, 2012, 73, pp.239-248. ⟨10.1016/j.ces.2012.01.040⟩. ⟨hal-00674411⟩