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It may not seem complicated, but selecting a scrubber can be a daunting task. The number of bristles, bristle hardness, arm length, and shape are all important to finding the right scrubber for your application and guaranteeing a simple and easy bathroom cleaning experience.
Wait, bathroom cleaning? Back up a second…
What GlobalSpec's Scrubber Selection Guide refers to is this:
(Credit: CCI Thermal Technologies)
Scrubbers in industry are pieces of equipment used primarily to clean streams of gas. In these cleaners, a fluid (typically water) is atomized (sprayed to form droplets) into the dirty gas flow. The droplets entrain particles and absorb pollutant gases to effectively wash the flow clean, a process aptly dubbed 'scrubbing'. The type of cleaning depends on the application, and may include the removal of various forms of particular matter, acid gases, or even excess heat.
It's not every day an engineer has to design or source a new scrubber system, but when he or she does it's not quite like selecting nuts and screws. There are a lot of factors to consider, and poor selection could have some costly consequences.
The first step to scrubber selection is getting a handle on the different types available. Common types of scrubbers include spray towers, cyclone spray chambers, venturi scrubbers, orifice scrubbers, and packed bed scrubbers. The range of performance of these different scrubber types is described in the table below:
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Scrubber Type |
Efficiency |
Power Inputs |
Liquid Requirements |
|
- | - |
hp/1000 cfm |
gal/1000 ft3 |
| Spray-chamber | 90% (+8µm particles) | 0.5 - 2 | 1 - 20 |
| Cyclone-spray | 95% (+5µm particles) | 1 - 3.5 | 2 - 10 |
| Impingement | 97% (+5µm particles) | 2 - 3 | 2 - 5 |
| Orifice | 97% (+5µm particles) | 0.5 | 2 - 4 |
| Venturi | 98% (+0.5µm particles) | 3 - 12 | 3 - 15 |
All the scrubbers mentioned above are 'wet' scrubbers, meaning they use water or another liquid in the process. Dry scrubbers, however, use dry sorbents or slurries to remove pollutants. This eliminates the problematic and costly handling of liquid waste, instead capturing a dry solid. Dry scrubbers are used mainly for removing acid and odorous gases in boilers, incinerators, and wastewater treatment facilities.
The next consideration is the flow orientation, or in which direction the spray hits the gas stream.
- Co-current scrubbers spray in the same direction as the gas flow. This orientation allows for the highest flow rates and smallest size scrubbers, but lowest removal efficiencies.
- Counter-current scrubbers spray in the opposite direction as the gas flow. These are the most efficient units, but have correspondingly lower flow rates.
- Cross current scrubbers spray perpendicular to the gas flow. These are the happy medium between counter-current and co-current arrangements, providing comparatively average efficiencies and flow rates.
This overview is just a snippet of what is important to know about selecting scrubbers. Other important factors include key performance specifications like minimum filtered particle size, and model types such as stationary scrubbers or trailer scrubbers. So while I can't recommend any selection resources for those complicated bathroom scrubbers, the next time you're looking for an industrial scrubber check out GlobalSpec's complete Air Scrubbers, Wet Scrubbers, and Gas Scrubbers Selection Guide.
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Re: Sourcing the Scrubber
