Influence of the free surface on hydrodynamics in a bubble column

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Abstract

In this paper, the influence of the free surface on hydrodynamics is investigated numerically for a pilot-scale bubble column. The free surface is modelled by means of the Volume of Fluid method (VOF), whereas the gas entities are represented by means of the Direct Simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) method. The VOF method is parallelized using MPI and incorporated in already parallel in-house numerical code for DSMC, FoxBerry. The results obtained with the modeled free surface are compared with the reference simulation, in which the free surface is mimicked using the outlet slits, placed at the top of the column. The results show a significant impact of the free surface on generation of the small-scale eddies. Moreover, the presence of the free surface reduces the gas-holdup in the domain.

Original languageEnglish
Article number100077
Number of pages12
JournalChemical Engineering Science: X
Volume8
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Nov 2020

Funding

This work was supported by the Netherlands Center for Multiscale Catalytic Energy Conversion (MCEC), an NWO Gravitation programme funded by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science of the government of the Netherlands . Authors also would like to thank SURF SARA ( www.surfsara.nl ) and NWO for the support in using the Cartesius supercomputer. Special thanks to E. Milacic for the help in implementation of the VOF method and to S. Kamath for sharing his DSMC-based code used for simulation of bubble dynamics.

Funders
Netherlands Center for Multiscale Catalytic Energy Conversion
SURF
Ministerie van Onderwijs, Cultuur en Wetenschap
Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek

    Keywords

    • Bubble column
    • Computational fluid dynamics
    • Direct Simulation Monte Carlo
    • Free surface
    • Large scale
    • Volume of fluid

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