NUMERICAL STABILITY ANALYSIS FOR REACTIVE MULTIPHASE FLOW IN SLURRY BUBBLE COLUMN REACTORS AND SOLID PROPELLANT ROCKETS

摘要

A two-dimensional, transient computer code for solving a generalization of Navier-Stokes equations for reacting multiphase flow was developed and tested for two applications: production of methanol in an Air Products slurry bubble column reactor and generation of particles in a rocket motor. For the slow catalytic methanol production the conventional ICE technique produced numerical solutions in agreement with Air Products pilot plant results and IITs hydrodynamics experiments. The code predicted the measured methanol production, the observed vortices and the catalyst viscosity obtained from measurements of granular temperature using a digital camera. However, for the rapid propellant combustion the conventional ICE technique proved problematic. In such problems the absolute error grows without bounds for explicit and for implicit numerical schemes, as for example, determined by von Neumann stability analysis. An analysis of the relative error showed how to finite difference the rate of reaction to obtain numerically stable solutions.