Numerical study of canister filters with alternatives filter cap configurations

Air filtration system and filter play an important role in getting a good quality air into turbo machinery such as gas turbine. The filtration system and filter has improved the quality of air and protect the gas turbine part from contaminants which could bring damage. During separation of contaminants from the air, pressure drop cannot be avoided but it can be minimized thus helps to reduce the intake losses of the engine [1]. This study is focused on the configuration of the filter in order to obtain the minimal pressure drop along the filter. The configuration used is the basic filter geometry provided by Salutary Avenue Manufacturing Sdn Bhd. and two modified canister filter cap which is designed based on the basic filter model. The geometries of the filter are generated by using SOLIDWORKS software and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software is used to analyse and simulates the flow through the filter. In this study, the parameters of the inlet velocity are 0.032 m/s, 0.063 m/s, 0.094 m/s and 0.126 m/s. The total pressure drop produce by basic, modified filter 1 and 2 is 292.3 Pa, 251.11 Pa and 274.7 Pa. The pressure drop reduction for the modified filter 1 is 41.19 Pa and 14.1% lower compared to basic filter and the pressure drop reduction for modified filter 2 is 17.6 Pa and 6.02% lower compared to the basic filter. The pressure drops for the basic filter are slightly different with the Salutary Avenue filter due to limited data and experiment details. CFD software are very reliable in running a simulation rather than produces the prototypes and conduct the experiment thus reducing overall time and cost in this study. (paper)