Gas–solid flows are widely found in various industrial processes, e.g. chemical engineering and sand ingestion test for aero-engine; the interaction between continuum and discrete particles in such systems always leads to complex phase structures of which fundamental understandings are needed. Within the OpenFOAM, the present work uses the discrete element method combined with the computational fluid dynamics to investigate the gas–solid flow behaviors in a dense fluidized bed under various conditions. A drag law which is for polydisperse systems derived from lattice Boltzmann simulations is incorporated into the computational fluid dynamics-discrete element method framework and its suitability for different flow regimes is investigated. The regimes including, namely slugging bed, jet-in-fluidized bed, spout fluidization, and intermediate, are simulated and validated against experiments. The results show that the lattice Boltzmann drag relation performs well in capturing characteristics of different gas–solid flow regimes. Good agreements are also obtained quantitatively by comparisons of pressure drop fluctuation, and time-averaged gas velocity and particle flux.
Parametric study of gas-solid flow characteristic by using integration computational fluid dynamics and dynamic simulation
