There are several well-known and widely used industrial cleaning methods in the market today. One of them is dry ice blasting. In this method, moisture-free air is compressed, mixed with solid CO2 particles, and blasted though a nozzle; in the process, the gas expands, propelling its velocity. The high-speed, two-phase flow cleans by supercooling and crushing particles on the surface, causing dry ice sublimation. As the nozzle is a crucial component of the system, the authors conducted a numerical analysis of the geometry of the proposed convergent-divergent nozzle. A mathematical model of the supersonic, two-phase flow was developed and implemented in commercial Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) code. Various operating parameters, such as inlet pressure and dry ice mass flow, were taken into consideration.
Numerical Analysis of Dry Ice Blasting Convergent-Divergent Supersonic Nozzle