CFD-DEM modeling of dense gas-solid reacting flow in the framework of GPU

Abstract

Dense gas–solid reacting flow widely exists in kinds of engineering fields, such as blast furnace ironmaking, pharmaceutical manufacturing, energy conversion, and chemical engineering. These processes containing both physical and chemical changes are extremely complex. Revealing the basic principles of the gas–solid flow government and thermochemical behavior is critical to the optimization, design, and control of kinds of dense gas–solid reacting systems. Computational fluid dynamics – discrete element method (CFD-DEM) is considered a potential tool to achieve this goal, which suffers from expensive computational resources. Accordingly, this work develops a graphics processing unit (GPU)-accelerated CFD-DEM reactive model, integrating with heat transfer, heterogeneous reactions, and homogenous reactions. The accuracy of the GPU-accelerated heat and mass transfer sub-models are detailly verified and the simulation results agree well with analytic solutions. Additionally, the current model can successfully simulate the thermochemical behavior of the particle cooling process and the coal-fueled chemical looping gasification process, confirming its reliability in numerically studying dense gas–solid reacting flow. Furthermore, the GPU-accelerated strategy is demonstrated to perform great speed-up performance and stability. This work provides a reliable and high-performance parallel calculation method for numerically studying dense gas–solid reacting flow.