Prediction of Flow Parameters of Glass Beads-Water Slurry flow through Horizontal Pipeline using Computational Fluid Dynamics

摘要

This paper presents a numerical analysis of two-phase glass beads-water slurry flow based on computational fluid dynamics through a 54.9 mm diameter and 4 m long horizontal pipe considering 125μm glass beads particle size over a flow velocity ranging from 1m/s to 5m/s at various volumetric concentration of the glass beads particle viz. 10%, 20%, 30%, 40% and 50%. For modeling the multiphase flow Eulerian two-phase approach was selected while for modeling the turbulence phase of the flow different turbulence models were introduced and Re-Normalization group K- epsilon model was selected after verifying the robustness of each turbulence model. Structured mesh with non-uniform spacing with a refinement near the wall boundary was selected for discretizing the entire fluid domain while control volume finite difference approach was selected for solving the Navier- Stokes governing equations in Analysis System 14.0 software package. Different flow variables like flow velocity distribution, pressure drop, concentration distribution of the particles, turbulence of the flow and their effects are studied and analyzed. In this study, a generalized mathematical relationship among pressure drop, volumetric concentration and turbulence of the flow has been proposed. The proposed mathematical relationship is then validated against the experimental data available in the previous literature and it was observed that the proposed model can forecast the pressure drop analytically with minimal error. It can be concluded from this study that the solid particles exhibit an asymmetrical distribution pattern along the vertical plane of the pipe cross section. However, as the flow velocity increases the solid particles are observed to be more blended with the liquid and leads to more symmetrical distribution. On the other hand, as the volumetric concentration increases the solid particles experience a more asymmetric distribution pattern and at low flow velocity and high volumetric concentration solid particles are settled at the bottom of the pipe. Volumetric concentration and flow velocity show a direct impact on the pressure drop where the pressure drop rises with the increase in volumetric concentration and flow velocity. Moreover, the comparison of the simulated results proves the practical utility of proposed model and high designing capability of Eulerian-Eulerian model with RNG k-? turbulence model.