A CFD Porous Materials Model to Test Soil Enriched with Nanostructured Zeolite Using ANSYS-Fluent(™)

Abstract

Soil health is a great concern worldwide due to the huge variety of pollutants and human activities that may cause damage. There are different ways to remediate and make a better use of soil and a choice may be using zeolite in activities like gardening, farming, environment amending, among others. In this work is proposed a model to simulate how mixing zeolite with soil may be beneficial in different ways, we are especially interested in interactions of mixed soil-zeolite with water. This model is based in different flow regimes where water interacts with two layers formed by nanostructured zeolite and soil in a vertical arrangement. The analysis is approached as a bi-layer porous material model resolved by using the mathematical model implemented in ANSYS-Fluent. Such model uses a multi-fluid granular model to describe the flow behavior of a fluid–solid mixture where all the available interphase exchange coefficient models are empirically based. Despite the great capabilities of numerical simulation tools, it is known that at present time, the literature lacks a generalized formulation specific to resolve this kind of phenomena where a porous media is analyzed. This model is developed to obtain a systematic methodology to test nanomaterials with porous features produced in our laboratory which is the next step for near future work within our research group.