Fly Ash Characterization and Prediction of Fly Ash and CO2 Removal Efficiencies for Indian Wet ESP

This article reports on the characterization of fly ash collected from the wet electrostatic precipitator (WESP) installed as air pollution control devise to an Indian coal fired thermal power plant. The samples were collected from various points such as the inlet and the outlet of WESP as well as from the settling tank of collected ash slurry. The characterization includes various analyses such as particle size distribution, Brauner-Emmette-Teller (BET) surface area and pore volume analysis, Fourier Transform Infra Red (FTIR) Spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction (XRD), Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) analysis and measuring the pH of fly ash samples collected from the various sources in distilled water. Finally, separate correlations were developed in order to predict the fly ash and CO2 removal efficiencies by the WESP as a function of different system variables by multiple non-linear regression analysis. The predicted values were in excellent agreement with the measured values.