Quantification of re-evaporated mass from loaded fibre-mist eliminators

Airborne lubricant emissions are a serious health hazard for employees in the metal working industry. The basic components of lubricants are oils and additives for adapting the properties to achieve the process demands. The oils used in lubricants are either mineral, synthetic or of biological origin. The lubricants are used as water-emulsions and also as straight oils. Extreme process conditions cause considerable amounts of aerosol and vapour emissions of lubricants into the working environment. Fibre filters are used in industrial demisters for pollution control and also for sampling purposes. Re-evaporation of separated lubricants from loaded fibre filters causes increased vapour emissions. Quantification of lubricant vapour emission was the subject of this research. An apparatus and an appropriate procedure for measuring the dynamic behaviour of evaporative losses from fibre filters were developed. The test piece of a loaded fibre filter was fixed in a sampling probe according to VDI 2066. The vapour concentration of organic compounds in downstream air was measured in real-time by using a photo-ionisation detector (PID). The PID was checked by sampling the vapour on an oleophilic adsorbent resin, solvent extraction and quantitative IR analysis and also gravimetrically. The two basic processes of filtering volatile aerosols are, on the one hand, collecting droplets on the fibres and, on the other hand, the evaporation of collected liquid. These two processes had to be separated in order to measure the increase of the vapour concentration caused by the tested fibre filter. The experiments were carried out using pure dodecane and hexadecane in order to avoid difficulties due to the unknown chemical composition of lubricant vapour. The variation of the air flow and the initial liquid mass on the filter covered the relevant range for industrial fibre demisters and for sampling methods based on collecting aerosols on fibre filters. It was found that the downstream air was saturated with lubricant vapour for a wide range of filter loads and filtration velocities. From the results obtained it can be concluded that loaded industrial filter systems emit air with saturation vapour concentration throughout their operation. Hence, vapour emissions can be estimated easily if the saturation vapour pressure and the mean relative molecular mass are known. Moreover, results obtained from measurements of filters with low loads confirm that the phase transition from liquid to vapour is influenced by the identified process parameters. This is relevant for measurement methods using fibre filters for sampling volatile aerosols. A semi-empirical model to estimate the evaporative losses for low loadings is proposed. However, further research is necessary to determine the full range of parameters that are relevant for evaporative losses from filters loaded with low masses of aerosols.