Abstract
A numerical method for simulation of unsteady flow in an air-lift pump, which is the main element of a deep-sea mining system, has been developed. The authors have proposed an iterative scheme for implicit time marching of density and pressure, and performed a numerical simulation of air-water two-phase flow using a drift -flux model. In the present paper, improvement of the scheme, especially for the convection term, is described. First, convective terms are discretized based on the velocity component of each phase. Second, the finite difference method, which has excellent energy conservation properties, is applied. Then, the upstream-shifted interpolation technique is introduced. Numerical results for both the unsteady features and the steady-state flow field show reasonable agreement with the experimental data obtained with the air-lift system of 200 m depth.
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