Reacting Carbon Particle-Laden Oxygen Gas Behind a Shock Wave

Abstract

An analysis of the flow field, which develops when a shock wave hits a two-phase medium comprising carbon particles and oxygen gas, has a practical application to industrial accidents such as explosions at coal mine and in grain elevator. Therefore, its successful prediction of thermo-fluid mechanical characteristics would be very crucial and imperative. This paper describes and inherent interaction phenomenon behind a shock wave for a two-phase medium of gas and particles with chemical reaction. A carbon particle-laden oxygen gas is considered to be located along a ramp so that numerical integration is accomplished from the tip of ramp for a finite period. For numerical solution, a fully conservative unsteady implicit 2nd order time-accurate sub-iteration method and the 2nd order Total Variation Diminishing (TVD) scheme are used with the finite volume method (FVM) for gas phase. For particle phase, the Monotonic Upstream Schemes for Conservation Laws (MUSCL) as well as the solution of the Riemann problem for the particle motion equations is used. The transient physical development is discussed in comparison with the cases of the pure gas and the reacting particle-laden gas. The results are then extended to changing the initial gas temperature as well as the particle diameter and particle mass fraction. Major results reveal that for the reacting particle-laden gas flow, the adverse pressure gradient is so high that there exists some region in which the particle velocity exceeds the gas velocity. When the particle diameter is smaller and the particle mass fraction is higher, the thermo-fluid dynamic behavior is significantly affected due to stronger interaction of momentum and thermal energy in two-phase mixture.