CFD-DEM Modeling of soluble NaCl particles conveyed in brine

Abstract

This study focuses on dissolution of NaCl in brine using CFD-DEM and one-dimensional modeling of this process, specifically for dilute horizontal conveying. Several user-defined functions are integrated in the code to describe the thermophysical property variations with changing concentration. The complete model is compared to different experiments with respect to two key parameters: particle size and brine concentration. Several correlations from the literature for the convective mass transfer, which is expressed by the Sherwood number, are implemented in the simulations and compared with experimental measurements to study their accuracy. It is found that both Archimedes- and Reynolds-based models for the Sherwood number are potentially suitable. However, the relative deviation from simulation results to two independent experiments were uncorrelated. For this type of flow, it was found that the one-dimensional model works poorly with Reynolds based models, but works very well with Archimedes based correlations.