Computational Fluid Dynamics analysis of Green Filtration Systems for Air Pollution Control

The current work deals with the CFD simulation to investigate the effect of the various types of plant panels on airflow as well as on pollutants spread in air filtration systems. Three different types of plant based filters namely blocking, parallel, and zigzag were utilized for studying the movement of PM10 particles at four different speed of air i.e., 0.5,1.0,1.5 and 2.0 m/s. On the basis of CFD simulation it was found that these types of layout of plant based panels have important role in determining airflow and filtration of pollutants. It was seen for the case of blocking panel, although the velocity of air has diminished considerably and at the same time pollutants were caught directly, but at the same time it causes generation of scattered zones of air were generated behind the panels usually encountered as higher velocities. Parallel configuration on the other hand offers less resistance and better consistent behaviour of airflow. It is customary to note that the due to zigzag plant filter panels maximum phenomenon of mixing and turbulence were observed which causes pollutants to remain circulated with maximum interaction with panels. Again due to this reason, zigzag pattern found to be highly effective for increment in pollutant mixing and provides improved effect of filtration via turbulence which in turn has considerably increased particle contact with vegetation. Therefore due to these CFD investigations it was clear that for optimized air flow and pollution control through green filtration systems both shape and positioning of plant panels are quite important. Hence in this work a sustainable approach and energy efficient plant based filtration effect was demonstrated for cleaning purpose of urban air. The future work may include optimization and prediction of air pollution parameters using various machine learning techniques.  

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