Numerical Simulation of Gas-Liquid Flow in a Stirred Tank with Swirl Modification

Although the standard k-epsilon model is most frequently used for turbulence modeling, it often leads to poor results for strongly swirling flows involved in stirred tanks and other processing devices. In this work, a swirling number, R(s), is introduced to modify the standard k-epsilon model. A Eulerian-Eulerian model is employed to describe the gas-liquid, two-phase flow in a baffled stirred tank with a Rushton impeller. The momentum and the continuity equations are discretized using the finite difference method and solved by the SIMPLE algorithm. The inner-outer iterative algorithm is used to account for the interaction between the rotating impeller and the static baffles. The predictions, both with and without R(s) corrections, are compared with the literature data, which illustrates that the swirling modification could improve the numerical simulation of gas-liquid turbulent flow in stirred tanks