Investigation of gas–liquid two‐phase flow field behavior based on computational fluid dynamics in a water‐sparged aerocyclone

Abstract

The water-sparged aerocyclone (WSA) is a new type of high efficient gas-liquid mass transfer equipment. The focus of this paper is to investigate the gas-liquid interaction, the distribution pattern of the flow field, and the distribution characteristics of turbulent kinetic energy in the coupled space of WSA. The Reynolds stress model and the multiphase flow model of volume of fluid were employed to simulate the distribution of three-dimensional flow field in WSA, simultaneously. In present work, the numerical simulation results match well with the measured pressure drop data. The simulation results show that the symmetry of the velocity distribution of the coupled field is weakened, and the decay rate of turbulent kinetic energy is raised with the increase of gas inlet velocity. The maximum value of the axial velocity occurs a phenomenon of metastasis from the vicinity of the wall to the center of the exhaust pipe along the radial distribution. The radial velocity reaches a maximum near the center of the coupling field. The tangential velocity distribution has peak areas near the WSA wall and near the central exhaust pipe, respectively. The research results can provide the basis for the optimal design and industrial scale-up of WSA. KEYWORDS computational fluid dynamics (CFD), flow field behaviors, gas-liquid, turbulent kinetic energy (TKE), water-sparged aerocyclone (WSA)