Introduction to CPFD Software and the Barracuda Virtual Reactor
Fluid-Particle flows
Examples
- Fluidized Beds
- Ore Reactors
- Cyclones
- Risers
- Deep Beds
What is different than single phase flows?
Particles are NOT fluids:
- Particles are discrete entities (cannot be subdivided like a fluid)
- Particles have a size distribution
- Particle cannot completely fill a space
- Particles occupy a physical volume (and displace fluid)
- Particles CAN support a shear stress (while fluids CANNOT support a shear stress)
Other considerations:
- Coupling between particles and fluids
- Wall treatments
- Boundary treatment
- Thermal, chemistry…
Modeling approaches
To accurately simulate fluid-particle flows, one must model the effects of:
- Drag and coupling
- Dilute flows (<1% by volume)
- Dense flows (up to close pack)
- Many particle sizes or size distribution
- Multiple types of particles (size, density, composition)
- Particle interactions (walls, other particles)
- Heat transfer
- Chemical reactions
- Gas-phase (homogeneous)
- Gas + particles (heterogeneous)
- Changing particle composition
There are different approaches to modeling particle flows
The CPFD? modeling approach
Overview
- What about the large number of particles?
- Lesser number of computational particles
- The particle field is resolved by using a reasonable number of computational particles
- Each computational particle represents one or more actual particle(s) with identical physical properties
- The physics are computed on the individual particle (e.g. drag based on size, chemistry, etc.)
- All changes experienced by the computational particle are applied to all actual particles represented by that computational particle (proper fluid displacement)
- Many CPFD calculations utilize between 500,000 and 5,000,000 computational particles
- What about particle contact and collision?
- Modeled, rather than directly computed
- Collision detection can be prohibitive with millions of computational particles
- Rather than computing which particle a given computational particle will impact, the CPFD method is more concerned with the question “is a collision likely to occur?”
- The collisions are then subjected to various models
- Enduring contact at close-pack handled via a non-linear stress tensor
- BGK-type collisional damping
- What about inter-phase coupling?
- Inter-phase interpolation operators, and tight, bi-directional coupling
- Different particles experience different motion, even though both are in the same cell
- All sub-grid particle motion is coupled back to the fluid phase momentum equation
Advantages and disadvantages
Advantages:
- PSD
- Erosion
- Number of particles
Disadvantages:
- Direct particle contact
- Multiple particles must fit in cell
Validation
- U m f U_{mf} Umf
- dP/dz
- 2D Bed
- PSRI Jet Cup