Particle Separation from Gases
The requirement of clean and unpolluted air is a driving force for the development of high efficient and sustainable systems for separation of particles from gas streams. Although introduced more than a century ago off-gas cleaning even today represents a big challenge in process engineering. Especially the removal of airborne particles with diameter in the submicron range (0.01-1µm) is still hard to realize which leads to the requirement of special apparatuses and usually high energy consumptions.
Particle separation is an important task not only for operators of large-scale plants (e.g. power plants) but also in the air cleaning for clean rooms in pharma- or electrical industry or in the product recovery during downstream processing of pharmaceuticals.
To meet these tasks research on the optimization of wet-scrubbers, electrostatic precipitators and filters is performed at the chair of solids process engineering.
Current Research Projects
Particle Separation in Fibrous Filters
In terms of cleaning gas streams from small up to medium volume flows fibrous filters are one of the most common technologies for separating particles or droplets. Fibrous filters offer several advantageous such as low investment and operating costs. For that reason these filters find applications in a broad field (power plants, spray drying, HEPA-filter for clean rooms, air cabin filters for cars…).
read more: Kevin Hoppe
Completed Research Projects
Electrostatic Precipitation of Submicron Particles
The bioavailability enhancement of poorly water soluble drugs can be achieved by the decrease of the particle size of active pharmaceutical ingredients. An innovative process is the spray drying with spray conditioning to produce submicron particles. A resulting challenge is the collection of these dispersed particles from a gas flow. This work examines the deposition of submicron particles in an electrostatic precipitator (ESP).
read more: Adrian Dobrowolski