Investigation of the crosswind effect on the performance of the atmospheric air purification tower
To handle the increasingly serious air pollution issue, the concept of atmospheric air purification tower already has been proposed. The first prototype of such a novel system had been built in Xi'an, China. The aim of this study is to numerically study how the crosswind affects the dust removal performance of the atmospheric air purification tower and which counter-wind strategy is optimal choice. To achieve that, a three-dimensional model considering the external environment was developed in ANSYS Fluent. With the help of the proposed model, the benefits of three wind breaking designs were quantified and compared. The results showed that the design with inner union-jack shaped wind break walls is the optimal for the atmospheric air purification tower. It can maintain the dust removal rate of the system at relatively high level (3.5 kg/h) no matter what crosswind intensity is.
