Abstract: One of the major air pollution problems of coal fired power plants is fine particulate matter emission. Fine particulate matters are considered potentially hazardous to health because of their high probability of deposition in deeper parts of the respiratory tract. Electrostatic precipitators (ESP) are one of the most widely used devices which are capable of controlling particulate emission effectively from power plants and other process industries. ESP system consists of flow field, electrostatic field and particle dynamics. Although the dust collecting efficiency of the industrial ESP is as high as 99.5%, an upcoming strict environmental protection agency (EPA) regulation has led the Australian power plants to start finding new technologies to meet new requirements for emission control at minimum cost and thus control their fine particulate emissions to a much greater degree than ever before. This presentation describes the numerical simulation and model development of ESP systems (i.e. flow field, electrostatic field and particle dynamics) using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code FLUENT and successful application of those models into an industrial ESP. The presentation recommends the options for controlling fine particle emission of power plants through improvement of the ESP efficiency.

Brief biography of the speaker:
Dr Rasul obtained his PhD in the area of Energy and Environment from The University of Queensland, Australia. He obtained his Master of Engineering in Energy Technology from Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok, Thailand. His first degree is in Mechanical Engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Dhaka, Bangladesh. Currently, Dr Rasul is a Senior Lecturer in Mechanical Engineering and Head of Department of Sustainability, College of Engineering and Built Environment, Faculty of Sciences, Engineering and Health, Central Queensland University, Australia. Dr Rasul has significant experience in working with process and environmental engineering industry in Australia as a consultant and senior R&D Engineer. Much of his research has been carried out for process industries. With over 115 publications and 15 research grants, Dr Rasul is specialised and experienced in research, teaching and consultancy in the areas of energy and environment, thermodynamics and thermofluid engineering, environmental fluid mechanics, process and power industry’s energy and pollution analysis, industrial and renewable energy systems analysis. Dr Rasul is a member of Engineers Australia and Australasian Association of Engineering Education.