Experimental and Numerical Analyses on Mixing Uniformity of Water and Saline in Pipe Flow

Abstract

Liquid—liquid mixing is commonly observed in many applications such as the chlorination of water supplies and the agricultural fertigation. In order to study the mixing law of water-chlorine or water-fertilizer in a turbulent pipeline, saline was selected as a tracer injected into the pipeline. In this paper, the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software was employed to study flow fields in water-saline pipelines. Four variates (mixing ratio δ, pipe diameter D, volume flow rate in the main pipe Q, saline density ρs) were considered to investigate the effects of multiple variates on mixing uniformity. The coefficient of variation (COV) was selected as the evaluation index of mixing uniformity, effective mixing length (LEML, the distance from the saline inlet to the fully mixed position) was chosen to quantitatively analyze the fully mixed position of water and saline in pipelines. The results of this numerical model agree well with experimental measurements and it shows that this model can effectively predict the concentration field of water and saline in the pipeline. Based on the experimental and simulated results, it was found that for the fixed mixing ratio, saline density and volume flow rate, the values of LEML increased significantly with increasing pipe diameters. Furthermore, dimensional analysis (D-A) was adopted to examine the influences of the four variates on LEML, and their correlation coefficient of the curve-fitting equation was calculated to be 0.996.