Numerical simulation of the sticking process of glass-microparticles to a flat wall to represent pollutant-particles treatment in a multi-channel cyclone

Ultrafine particles are dangerous to human health and are usually difficult to separate from airflow because of their low inertia, which helps them to stick easily to surfaces because of adhesive forces. This characteristic provides opportunities for adhesive ultrafine particle separation by designing air-cleaning devices that exploit the sticking ability. To understand governing effects in such air-cleaning devices, which can be designed as multi-channel cyclones, the sticking of adhesive spherical glass particles under oblique impact has been investigated numerically by using the discrete element method. An adhesive dissipative contact model was applied by implementing different interaction forces for various-sized ultrafine pollutant particles. Normal loading is represented by the elastic Hertz contact model, whereas viscous damping is described by the modified nonlinear Tsuji model. The influence of deformation-dependent adhesive forces for a range of ultrafine particle sizes is illustrated during the sticking process. Dissipative oscillations during the sticking process were observed because of the influence of viscous damping forces.