Wood Pulp Digetster Wall Corrosion Investigation

The modeling of the flow in a wood pulp digester is but one component of the investigation of the corrosion of digesters. This report describes the development of a Near-Wall-Model (NWM) that is intended to couple with a CFD model that determines the flow, heat, and chemical species transport and reaction within the bulk flow of a digester. Lubrication theory approximations were chosen from which to develop a model that could determine the flow conditions within a thin layer near the vessel wall using information from the interior conditions provided by a CFD calculation of the complete digester. The other conditions will be determined by coupled solutions of the wood chip, heat, and chemical species transport and chemical reactions. The NWM was to couple with a digester performance code in an iterative fashion to provide more detailed information about the conditions within the NW region. Process Simulations, Ltd (PSL) is developing the digester performance code. This more detailed (and perhaps more accurate) information from the NWM was to provide an estimate of the conditions that could aggravate the corrosion at the wall. It is intended that this combined tool (NWM-PSL) could be used to understand conditions at/near the wall in order to develop methods to reduce the corrosion. However, development and testing of the NWM flow model took longer than anticipated and the other developments (energy and species transport, chemical reactions and linking with the PSL code) were not completed. The development and testing of the NWM are described in this report. In addition, the investigation of the potential effects of a clear layer (layer reduced in concentration of wood chips) near the wall is reported in Appendix D. The existence of a clear layer was found to enhance the flow near the wall