Experimental study on a new inertial impact filter for small nuclear power reactor

•A new type of inertial impact filter test bench was built.•Visualization experiment is built in inertial impact filter.•The r-coefficient of the test bench was measured.•The inertial impactor test bench reflects the pressure drop and collection efficiency of the actual filtration. Most of the aerosol filters used in nuclear power plants directly or indirectly use filtering media and need to be replaced regularly. However, under high radioactive conditions, this work is very difficult. At the same time, in small nuclear power reactors, in order to obtain higher filtering efficiency, the flow channel of the aerosol filter is usually designed to be narrow, which will cause large flow resistance in the aerosol filtering process. Once a nuclear accident occurs, it will seriously affect the pressure relief of the containment. To solve the above problems, this article designs a microfluidic inertial impactor aerosol filter based on the working principle of inertial impactors. The deposition of aerosol particles in inertial impactors is observed and analyzed through visual experiments. At the same time, based on the filter weighing method and isokinetic sampling method, the related coefficient, filtration efficiency and dust capacity of the inertial impactor are measured and studied, and the pressure difference transmitter is used to monitor the pressure difference between the inlet and outlet of the inertial impactor during filtering.