Use of Mesh Adaptivity in Simulation of Flow in Packed Beds with Application to Heap Leaching

摘要

Computational modelling of transport phenomena in heap leaching is of interest for the design and optimisation of these processes. We present a numerical method for simulation of multiphase flow in porous media with application to heap leaching. The governing equations are the conservation of mass and the Darcy's law. The primary variables are pressure and saturation. To discretize pressure, a control volume finite element method is employed while saturation is discretized by a node-centered control volume method. The numerical scheme is implemented in Fluidity, a general purpose flow simulator that is equipped with anisotropic mesh adaptivity techniques to control local solution errors and increase computational accuracy. In this paper, we demonstrate the application of the developed method to solve for incompressible flow of air and liquid within a packed bed of non-porous particles representing a heap leaching process at smaller scale. We compare our results with experimental measurements by Ilankoon and Neethling [12] and show a very good agreement.