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A computational study was performed both of a single agglomerate and of the collision of two agglomerates in a shear flow. The agglomerates were extracted from a direct numerical simulation of a turbulent agglomeration process, and had the loosely packed fractal structure typical of agglomerate structures formed in turbulent agglomeration processes. The computation was performed using a discrete-element method for adhesive particles with four-way coupling, accounting both for forces between the fluid and the particles (and vice versa) as well as force transmission directly between particles via particle collisions. In addition to understanding and characterizing the particle dynamics, the study focused on illuminating the fluid flow field induced by the agglomerate in the presence of a background shear and the effect of collisions on this particle-induced flow. Perhaps the most interesting result of the current work was the observation that the flow field induced by a particle agglomerate rotating in a shear flow has the form of two tilted vortex rings with opposite-sign circulation. These rings are surrounded by a sea of stretched vorticity from the background shear flow. The agglomerate rotates in the shear flow, but at a slower rate than the ambient fluid elements. In the computations with two colliding agglomerates, we observed cases resulting in agglomerate merger, bouncing and fragmentation. However, the bouncing cases were all observed to also result in an exchange of particles between the two colliding agglomerates, so that they were influenced both by elastic rebound of the agglomerate structures as well as by tearing away of particulate matter between the agglomerates. Overall, the problems of agglomerate–flow interaction and of the collision of two agglomerates in a shear flow are considerably richer in physical phenomena and more complex than can be described by the common approximation that represents each agglomerate by an ‘equivalent sphere’.

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Dust flames are associated with two-phase combustion phenomena where flame characteristics depend on interactions between solid and gas phases. Since organic dust particles can be effectively utilized in energy production systems, investigation of this phenomenon is essential. In this study, an analytical model is presented to simulate the combustion process of moist organic dust. The flame structure is divided into three zones: preheat zone, reaction zone, and postflame zone. To determine the effects of moisture content and volatile evaporation, the preheat zone is also divided into four subzones: first heating subzone and drying subzone, second heating subzone, and volatile evaporation subzone. The results obtained from the presented model are in reasonable agreement with experimental data for lycopodium particles. An increase in moisture content causes a reduction in burning velocity owing to moisture evaporation resistance. Consequently, the effects of some important parameters, like volatilization temperature, volatilization Damköhler number and drying Damköhler number are investigated. In special cases, like high moisture content, low volatilization temperature, and high drying resistance, the second heating subzone is omitted.

Modeling the response of interacting particles, droplets, or bubbles to subgrid-scale fluctuations in turbulent flows is a long-standing challenge in multiphase flow simulations using the Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes approach. The problem also arises for large-eddy simulation for sufficiently small values of the Kolmogorov-scale particle Stokes number. This paper expands on a recently proposed stochastic vortex structure (SVS) method for modeling of turbulence fluctuations for colliding or otherwise interacting particles. An accelerated version of the SVS method was developed using the fast multipole expansion and local Taylor expansion approach, which reduces computation speed by two orders of magnitude compared to the original SVS method. Detailed comparisons are presented showing close agreement of the energy spectrum and probability density functions of various fields between the SVS computational model, direct numerical simulation (DNS) results, and various theoretical and experimental results found in the literature. Results of the SVS method for particle collision rate and related measures of particle interaction exhibit excellent agreement with DNS predictions for homogeneous turbulent flows. The SVS method was also used with adhesive particles to simulate formation of particle agglomerates with different values of the particle Stokes and adhesion numbers, and various measures of the agglomerate structure are compared to the DNS results.