With the advent of the Clean Air Act in 1970, the number of air
pollution control equipment installations has increased at an
accelerated pace. Although much has been written on attaining collection
performance with the various control devices, a major void has occurred
in the identification and transfer of information needed to help reduce
maintenance costs and to prevent deterioration of collector perform-
ance. Although design and selection information is presented, it is the
primary inten- tion of this book to discuss operation and maintenance
topics and explore many of the repetitive problems that have plagued
users of air pollution control equipment. The existence of these
problems may be related to the complexity of the process or to a lack of
well-defined operation techniques, among other reasons. In any event,
this book intends to emphasize where and how these factors can have a
major impact on the maintenance problems of control devices. Operation
and maintenance problems have plagued users for nearly 100 years.