NUMERICAL ANALYSIS OF TURBULENT GAS-SOLID FLOWS IN A VERTICAL PIPE USING THE EULERIAN TWO-FLUID MODEL

Turbulent gas-solid flows are readily encountered in many industrial and environmental processes. The development of a generic modeling technique for gas-solid turbulent flows remains a significant challenge in the field of mechanical engineering. Eulerian models are typically used to model large systems of particles. In this dissertation, a numerical analysis was carried out to assess a current state-of-the-art Eulerian two-fluid model for fully-developed turbulent gas-solid upward flow in a vertical pipe. The two-fluid formulation of Bolio et al. (1995) was adopted for the current study and the drag force was considered as the dominant interfacial force between the solids and fluid phase. In the first part of the thesis, a two-equation low Reynolds number k-ε model was used to predict the fluctuating velocities of the gas-phase which uses an eddy viscosity model. The stresses developed in the solids-phase were modeled using kinetic theory and the concept of granular temperature was used for the prediction of the solids velocity fluctuation. The fluctuating drag, i.e., turbulence modulation term in the transport equation of the turbulence kinetic energy and granular temperature was used to capture the effect of the presence of the dispersed solid particles on the gas-phase turbulence. The current study documents the performance of two popular turbulence modulation models of Crowe (2000) and Rao et al. (2011). Both models were capable of predicting the mean velocities of both the phases which were generally in good agreement with the experimental data. However, the phenomena that small particles cause turbulence suppression and large particles cause turbulence enhancement was better captured by the model of Rao et al. (2011); conversely, the model of Crowe (2000) produced turbulence enhancement in all cases. Rao et al. (2011) used a modified wake model originally proposed by Lun (2000) which is activated when the particle Reynolds number reaches 150. This enables the overall model to produce turbulence suppression and augmentation that follows the experimental trend. The granular temperature predictions of both models show good agreement with the limited experimental data of Jones (2001). The model of Rao et al. (2011) was also able to capture the effect of gas-phase turbulence on the solids velocity fluctuation for three-way coupled systems. However, the prediction of the solids volume fraction which depends on the value of the granular temperature shows noticeable deviations with the experimental data of Sheen et al. (1993) in the near-wall region. Both turbulence modulation models predict a flat profile for the solids volume fraction whereas the measurements of Sheen et al. (1993) show a significant decrease near the wall and even a particle-free region for flows with large particles. The two-fluid model typically uses a low Reynolds number k-ε model to capture the near-wall behavior of a turbulent gas-solid flow. An alternative near-wall turbulence model, i.e., the two-layer model of Durbin et al. (2001) was also implemented and its performance was assessed. The two-layer model is especially attractive because of its ability to include the effect of surface roughness. The current study compares the predictions of the two-layer model for both clear gas and gas-solid flows to the results of a conventional low Reynolds number model. The effects of surface roughness on the turbulence kinetic energy and granular temperature were also documented for gas-particle flows in both smooth and rough pipes