Particle movement and hydraulic impact in dense two-phase solid–liquid flow inside a water–iron sand jet

Abstract

High-pressure and multi-phase jet technology is widely used in applications to reduce energy consumption, especially when cleaning steel strips. The dynamics of jet flow and energy transfer in two-phase solid–liquid flow is intricate, particularly in the presence of dense particles. Constructing mathematical models of such interactions is challenging due to the complexity of particle-to-particle and particle-to-fluid contact. An optimized method based on a dense discrete-phase model is proposed to accurately track the movement of dense particles in this study. We used the proposed approach to investigate the movement of particles, the corresponding mechanism of the flow field, and the characteristics of wear while considering the hydraulic forces acting on the particles by using minimal resources for calculation. The results indicate that this method can be used to accurately count an extremely large number of particles and capture their dynamics. The particles acquired kinetic energy from the high-pressure jet, and most of them moved downstream with the main flow. However, part of them migrated toward the bilateral region, participated in the formation and evolution of the vortex, and washed the bottom of a mixture chamber. The impact of the particles at the bottom of a mixing chamber exhibited time-averaged characteristics in terms of the number of collisions and the average normal and tangential forces. The curve of the rate of average wear includes three stages: single-phase flow (no wear), mixed flow (rapid wear), and stable flow (rapid and stable wear at a rate of 9.29 × 10−4 mm/s).