Utilization of rice-husk packed beds as fine dust collectors at heavy dust loadings

Typical rice mills generally generate tonnes of biomass which is rice husks and a significant quantity of coarse and fine dusts from the paddy, resulting in public health concern. Instead of normal air cyclones which are not efficient for collecting fine soft-hair (detached pubescence) particles smaller than a few microns, a new system using packed beds of rice husks was developed for collection fine dusts. It was found that the rice-husk packed beds could exhibit an effective performance in capturing fine dusts at various dust loadings with collection efficiency higher than 85% by mass. The filtrating phenomenon could be observed as an integrated effect of cake and deep-bed filtrations due to the heavy dust loads, agglomeration of dusts, and cohesion between the dusts and bed of irregularly shaped rice husks. Both the pressure drop across the bed and the overall filtration efficiency remarkably increased at the initial clean stage, then increased more slowly due to the recurrent fracture of the dust cake layer.