Cooking grease particles purification review and technology combination strategy evaluation for commercial kitchens

Effective emission control of cooking oil fumes (COFs), particularly for grease particles, has always been a cause of great concern for catering industry. The review and evaluation of combinations of purification technology are urgently required. This work presents a literature review and combination strategy evaluation of purification technology of grease particles of commercial kitchens. A variety of mainstream purification technologies, such as mechanical separation (M), filtration (F), washing absorption (W) and electrostatic deposition (E) are discussed. In order to establish a complete and efficient fume purification system for commercial kitchen, this study proposes the four-point principles of combined purification technologies as: (1) from easy to difficult (for grease particle diameter); (2) fire prevention and noise reduction; (3) electrostatic deposition postposition; (4) Absorption and dissolution (by-product from electrostatic). Based on the above principles and separation characteristics, the recommended combinations of purification strategies are M-E, F-E, M-F-E and M-E-F. The combination strategy of M-F-E is adopted as an example to evaluate and optimize COFs purification system use life cycle assessment approach. The results indicate that the optimization of the M-F-E purification system using rotating mesh plate instead of baffle filter can reduce the environmental impact of global warming and eutrophication by about 35% which reduces the emissions of CO₂ and SO₂ from 92.533 kg and 0.110 kg to 60.214 kg and 0.072 kg, respectively. Besides the review of relevant purification technologies, the study also proposes the combination of principles of purification technologies and the evaluation and optimization of life cycle assessment for the optimal design of combined purification system.