Steady Free Surface Flow of a Fluid-Solid Mixture Down an Inclined Plane

The present work is an extension of the investigations performed by Massoudi and Anand (2001). The free surface flow problem is studied here. Numerical solutions for steady free surface flow of a solid-fluid mixture down an inclined plane are presented. The problem is formulated using the mixture theory framework. The resulting set of three coupled nonlinear differential equations is nondimensionalized. A parametric study is conducted to understand the influence of the dimensionless numbers on the velocity and volume fraction. The maximum fluid velocity is found to decrease with increase in the ratio of the drag force to the viscous forces within the fluid phase (D₁). The fluid phase velocity was found to decrease with increase in the ratio of the drag force to viscous force within the solid component (D₂), and the corresponding solid phase velocity was found to increase.     

Full-loop study of a dual fluidized bed cold flow system: Hydrodynamic simulation and validation

The unsteady behaviors of the air-silica sand flow in a lab-scale dual fluidized bed gasification cold flow system have been studied. A two-dimensional computational fluid dynamics full-loop model with poly-size distribution in solid phases was developed as an innovation of this study to investigate the effects of crucial parameters on system hydrodynamics. The results showed a decrease in the mixture static pressure from the bottom to the upper regions of the system, which maintained the system operations stable. The riser air inlet velocity and the gasifier static bed height were found to play considerable roles in enhancing the total sand flow rates. The same tendencies in the prediction and experiment of both the mixture pressure and the sand flow rate showed the feasibility of the proposed model. Besides, the residual evaluation enhanced data reliability and supported model validation. Especially, undesirable phenomena possibly occurring in the system operation under improper conditions could also be predicted. Accordingly, the inventory of bed material and the fluidizing gas flow rates should be suitably regulated to maintain pressure balances, trouble-free continuous flow, optimal sand circulation rate, and low solids loss. Furthermore, the obtained results in this study can be used as a reference for optimizing the designs and operational conditions of large-scale plants.