• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.679-686
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• 2018

A new dust cleaning vehicle is needed to remove fine and ultra-fine particulate matter in subway tunnels. Therefore, the recently developed tunnel cleaning vehicle is equipped with an efficient suction system and cyclone-based prefilter to handle ultra-fine particles. To treat various sizes of particulate matter with an underbody suction system, this paper proposes a cyclone-based prefilter in the suction system and validates the dust removal efficiency through Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis using ANSYS FLUENT. Using the created surface and volume mesh, various particle sizes, materials, and fan flow rates, the particles were tracked in the flow with a discrete phase model. As a result, the dust cleaning vehicle at a normal operational speed of 5km/h requires at least a fan flow rate of $1500m^3/min$ and 100mm of suction inlet height from the tunnel track floor. Those suction modules and cyclone-based prefilters in the dust cleaning vehicle reduces the dust accumulation load of the electric precipitator and helps remove the accumulated fine and ultra-fine dust in the subway tunnel.