Novel post-treatment of removed fine dust particle: Electrorheological application

Abstract

Capturing and removal (or post-treatment) of fine dust particles is crucial to solving environmental issues, while various studies have been conducted on capturing particulate matter (PM), which consists of fine dust particles. Post-treatment, or the usage of removed fine dust particles, however, has not been deeply investigated. In this study, an electrorheological (ER) fluid system with 5 vol% of fine dust particles dispersed in silicone oil is introduced as an alternative to apply fine dust particles as they are a mixture of various chemical compounds, including organic pollutants. Fine dust particles are found to be suitable for use in ER fluids owing to their particle polarity. Both rheological characteristics such as flow curve, ER efficiency, dynamic moduli, and relaxation modulus and polarization analyses of the fine dust particle-based ER fluid are conducted using dielectric measurement, clearly showing that the captured fine dust particles can be newly adopted as a smart ER material. Yield stresses obtained give the slope of 2.0 with applied electric field strengths, demonstrating that the ER fluid follows the polarization mechanism. Economic issue of the fine dust particles as for the ER material along with its lifetime and potential applications is also qualitatively considered.