Numerical Study of Particle Interaction in Gas-Particle and Liquid-Particle Flows: Part I Analysis and Validation

Abstract

A detailed study into the turbulent behaviour of dilute particulate flow under the influence of two carrier phases namely gas and liquid has been carried out behind a sudden expansion geometry. The major endeavour of the study is to ascertain the response of the particles within the carrier (gas or liquid) phase. The main aim prompting the current study is the density difference between the carrier and the dispersed phases. While the ratio is quite high in terms of the dispersed phase for the gas-particle flows, the ratio is far more less in terms of the liquid-particle flows. Numerical simulations were carried out for both these classes of flows using an Eulerian two-fluid model with RNG based k- emodel as the turbulent closure. An additional kinetic energy equation to better represent the combined fluid-particle behaviour is also employed in the current set of simulations. In the first part of this two part series, experimental results of Fessler and Eaton (1995) for Gas-Particle (GP) flow and that of Founti and Klipfel (1998) for Liquid-Particle (LP) flow have been compared and analysed. This forms the basis of the current study which aims to look at the particulate behaviour under the influence of two carrier phases. Further numerical simulations were carried out to test whether the current numerical formulation can used to simulate these varied type of flows and the same were validated against the experimental data of both GP as well LP flow. Qualitative results have been obtained for both these classes of flows with their respective experimental data both at the mean as well as at the turbulence level for carrier as well as the dispersed phases.