The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of the turbulent structure of the swirling flows on the particle motions using numerical simulation. In this work, we deal with the swirling turbulent flows in an axially rotating pipe because of focusing on the influence of swirl effect on the particle motions. Direct numerical simulation (DNS) of gas-particle turbulent swirling flows in the axially rotating pipe at the Reynolds number 180, based on the friction velocity and the pipe radius, and the rotating ratios 0.25 and 0.3 based on the bulk velocity was performed. Particle motions were treated by a Lagragian method with inter-particle collisions calculated by a deterministic method. In order to investigate the influence of swirl effect on the particle motions in detail, the one-way method in which fluid motion is not affected by particles is adopted. In particular, the effect of the inter-particle collisions on particle motions was carefully investigated because it is considered that particles accumulate near the wall due to the centrifugal force and local particle concentration is very high in the region.
Numerical simulation of particle concentration in a gas cyclone separator