CFD-DEM simulation of pneumatic conveying in a horizontal pipe

In this paper, the combined approach of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and discrete element method (DEM) is used to study pneumatic conveying in a horizontal pipe. A new three-dimensional modified wall roughness (WR) model and the discrete random walk (DRW) model are introduced into the CFD-DEM approach to simulate the effect of wall roughness and the random effect of turbulence on particle dispersion respectively. The interaction between particles and fluid of the pneumatic conveying in a horizontal pipe is calculated by both the one-way coupling method and the two-way coupling method. The flow characteristics of the pneumatic conveying in a horizontal pipe, including the particle velocity, the particle mass flux, and the particle trajectory are obtained by the simulations. The particle mass flux predicted by the CFD-DEM with WR-DRW is quite different with that predicted by the traditional CFD-DEM approach although the particle horizontal velocities obtained by two different approaches are similar, and the distribution of particles across the pipe cross section predicted by the CFD-DEM with WR-DRW is more uniform than that predicted by the traditional CFD-DEM approach. The accuracy of the CFD-DEM with WR-DRW is validated by the corresponding experiments from literatures. Comparing to the computational fluid dynamics - discrete phase model (CFD-DPM) without considering collision between particles, the CFD-DEM with WR-DRW developed in this work can be applied to study the pneumatic conveying in a horizontal pipe under both dilute and dense phase conditions.