An Investigation into Air-Sand-Water Three-Phase Flow through the Sandblasting Nozzle

Abstract

The numerical analysis of air-sand-water three-phase turbulent flow through converging-diverging nozzle is investigated for employing on sandblasting systems. For this purpose-dispersed flow of air-sand-water by various airs inlet pressures and different mass flow rates of sand particles and water droplets were considered. Two-way turbulence coupling between particles/droplets and airflow as well as interference between the incident streams of particles and rebounded from the wall were applied in the numerical model. In addition, the shock wave, which is produced in supersonic flow at diverging part of nozzle, was considered. In this study the Realizable k-ε and Discrete Phase models were utilized for simulating of multi-phase turbulent flow through the converging-diverging nozzle. As review of literature indicates there is not any experimental or analytical data on three-phase flow through the nozzle, consequently for validation of model, the same turbulent and multi-phase models were utilized on air-water two-phase flow. The obtained results were in good agreement with the experimental data. According to the results of three-phase flow simulation, the averaged exhaust momentum of sand particles had inverse proportion with water mass flow rate, and increasing of air inlet pressure had significant effect on mean exhaust velocity of sand particles.