Closures for Course-Grid Simulation of Fluidized Gas-Particle Flows

Abstract

Gas-particle flows in fluidized beds and riser reactors are inherently unstable, and they manifest fluctuations over a wide range of length and time scales. Two-fluid models for such flows reveal unstable modes whose length scale is as small as ten particle diameters. Yet, because of limited computational resources, gas-particle flows in large fluidized beds are invariably simulated by solving discretized versions of the two-fluid model equations over a coarse spatial grid. Such coarse-grid simulations do not resolve the small-scale spatial structures which are known to affect the macroscale flow structures both qualitatively and quantitatively. Thus there is a need to develop filtered two-fluid models which are suitable for coarse-grid simulations and capturing the effect of the small-scale structures through closures in terms of the filtered variables. The overall objective of the project is to develop validated closures for filtered two-fluid models for gas-particle flows, with the transport gasifier as a primary, motivating example. In this project, highly resolved three-dimensional simulations of a kinetic theory based two-fluid model for gas-particle flows have been performed and the statistical information on structures in the 100-1000 particle diameters length scale has been extracted. Based on these results, closures for filtered two-fluid models have been constructed. The filtered model equations and closures have been validated against experimental data and the results obtained in highly resolved simulations of gas-particle flows. The proposed project enables more accurate simulations of not only the transport gasifier, but also many other non-reacting and reacting gas-particle flows in a variety of chemical reactors. The results of this study are in the form of closures which can readily be incorporated into existing multi-phase flow codes such as MFIX (www.mfix.org). Therefore, the benefits of this study can be realized quickly. The training provided by this project has prepared a PhD student to enter research and development careers in DOE laboratories or chemicals/energy-related industries.