Produced Water Report: Do nanofibers improve filter performance?

Recent experimental works have demonstrated the benefits of adding nanofibers to microfiber nonwoven filter media. In this work, single fiber efficiencies and drag are applied to model filter performance for steady-state coalescence of oil drops from air streams. The model results show the same trends as observed in the experiments, namely that the addition of small amounts of nanofibers significantly increase the Quality Factor. New results from the model and experiments show that there is an optimum amount of nanofiber. INTRODUCTION Recent work shows improved performance of nonwoven filter media by the addition of small amounts of nanofibers.1 The purpose of this work is to determine whether there is an optimum amount of nanofibers to add to the filter media. Our approach to this project is to model the filter using single-fiber capture mechanisms and single-fiber drag forces.