An investigation of the effects of volume fraction on drag coefficient of non-spherical particles using PR-DNS
Conference
Mahyawansi, P, Lin, CX. (2021). An investigation of the effects of volume fraction on drag coefficient of non-spherical particles using PR-DNS
. 1 10.1115/FEDSM2021-65809
Mahyawansi, P, Lin, CX. (2021). An investigation of the effects of volume fraction on drag coefficient of non-spherical particles using PR-DNS
. 1 10.1115/FEDSM2021-65809
Prediction of the drag coefficient is required in gas-particle multiphase flow modeling and simulation. Experimental data and correlations on the fixed-bed system of spherical particles with high volume fractions for various possible arrangements are available in the literature. However, the effect of volume fraction on the drag coefficient of non-spherical particles is not well studied. In solving the momentum equation, the volume fraction plays a vital role in determining the flow resistances. In this paper, we study the impact of volume fraction in the range of 0.069 to 0.65 on the drag coefficient using the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation of air for Reynold number in the range of 10 to 10000 using particle resolved direct numerical solution (PR-DNS). Regular non-spherical particles such as a cube, tetrahedron, and spheroids are used in this study since their single particle's drag coefficient data are available in the literature for comparison. For this work, the simulations are carried out in the Ansys Fluent using polyhedral mesh, which consumes significantly less computational time and power. The study showed the sphericity and volume fraction have significant impact on the bed pressure drop and average drag coefficient of the particles in the bed especially in high Reynolds number regime. The bed of the spheroid experiences the lowest drag being the most streamlined particle, and the particles with the edges result in a large drag coefficient due to flow separation at the discontinuity. The vector plots verify this behavior where large wake regions are observed behind the tetrahedron particle.
