(688c) The Effect of Various Fibrous Filter Media and Newly Designed Packaging Configurations on Sea Salt Particles Loading Performance

Recently, Solid Oxide Fuel Cells (SOFCs) are being considered for use as power sources on ships due to the high energy efficiency and low waste emission. However, the exposure to several air contaminants like gaseous impurities and particulates is highly detrimental to the performance of fuel cells. In the ocean environment, sea salt particles are the most common particulates and therefore, their removal from air stream fed into cathode side of fuel cell system is essential. Currently, filters have been widely applied to remove those salt particles. In order to evaluate their performances, it is necessary to estimate the maximum amount of salt particles they can be loaded. In this work, a new approach is proposed and experimentally verified to evaluate the salt particles loading capacity of filters. Various filter media, including surface filter media, depth filter media, woven and nonwoven filter media, were tested and loading performance was calculated on a bench scale setup. Comparisons of particles loading capacity for those different filter media will be presented. Moreover, pleated filter design is a common approach in the air filtration industry in order to increase the available filter media area and reduce the pressure drop across the filter, and thus, loading capacity of salt particles can be improved. Multi-Element Structured Arrays (MESAs) developed by our group represents a novel approach that is able to further increase the media area and reduce the pressure drop across the filter via integration of several pleated filters into a single unit. In order to achieve a further understanding, single pleated filters and MESAs were tested on a 24" × 24" full scale test rig (based on ASHRAE 52.2 Standard) for estimation of loading capacity of salt particles. Effects of varying filter media type, filter depth, pleat count and MESAs element count on the particles loading performance were experimentally investigated. The results and discussions will be presented in depth.