Study on performance of wave-plate mist eliminator with porous foam layer as enhanced structure. Part II: Experiments

•A wave-plate mist eliminator with porous foam as enhanced structure is designed.•Separation efficiency and pressure drop are investigated experimentally.•Validity of earlier simulation is verified by comparing with experiment results.•Phenomenon of the suppression for re-entrainment by foam layer is discussed.

In this paper, a new kind of wave-plate mist eliminator using open-celled porous silicon carbide foam layers as enhanced structure has been firstly proposed. The effects of foam layer geometry parameters (foam layer thickness, porosity, PPI) on droplet performance (separation efficiency and pressure drop) were experimentally investigated. Re-entrainment mechanism influenced by flooding state in the foam layer was also discussed. Downstream droplet diameter distribution under the re-entrainment conditions were also investigated by color-developing method. The results show that the sample with smaller foam pore size has larger volume mean diameter of secondary droplets in the outflow, due to its weaker liquid drainage ability. Comparisons between the experiment and our earlier numerical simulation demonstrate the average relative errors of the separation efficiency and the pressure drop are within 10%, meanwhile trends relating demister performance to foam geometry parameters are the same between the two sets of results, indicating the validity of the simulation method. In addition, two empirical correlations were obtained by fitting the experimental data, which can be used for predicting separation efficiency and pressure drop in the selected experiment conditions.