COMPUTATIONAL FLUID DYNAMIC STUDY OF MIXING IN LARGE SCALE DIESEL STORAGE VESSELS

摘要

Appropriate mixing in diesel storage vessels guarantees homogeneity in the final product,preventing the production of off-specification fuels caused by inadequate homogenization in thestorage equipment. Nowadays, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) has been widely used in theindustry to model mixing processes in order to investigate mixing properties and to perform aneventual process optimization, especially in large scale mixing tanks where experimental work isdifficult and expensive. Additionally, good agreement between experimental and CFD-predictedresults has been found in literature.In this work, the CFD technique is used to simulate the hydrodynamic behavior of a current dieselstorage tank located in a Brazilian refinery. The commercial package ANSYS 12.1 is used toperform the simulations. The Multiple Frames of Reference (MFR) approach is used to model themixer movement. The turbulence effects are incorporated by means of the Shear Stress Transport(SST) turbulence model. The velocity distribution inside the vessel for several mixer-tank layoutswas investigated by varying the offset angle from the tank center line. The simulation resultsobtained for the evaluated scenarios were compared and are in good agreement with the informationfound on literature for this kind of equipments.