CFD-DEM Study of Particle-Laden Cavity Flow for Bi-Dispersed Particles

Particle-laden flows are important to various applications e.g. slurry transport, liquid-solid fluidized bed reactors, etc. Most of the simulations performed in the literature (Ekambara et al. (2009), Chen et al. (2016), etc) have studied local particle and flow behaviour i.e. solid velocity ( U_s ), liquid velocity (U_l), critical deposition velocity, etc in particle-laden flows for monodispersed particles. Since the particles used in industries are rarely monodispersed in nature, it is important to investigate the local flow behaviour for bi-dispersed particles. In the present study, we have performed 3D CFD-DEM approach to simulate the particle-laden flows for bi-dispersed particles of different sizes and densities in a confined cavity. The effect of mixture composition on fluid vorticity, U_s and particle deposition behaviour has been explored using numerical simulations. It has been observed that the lighter particles tend to get caught in the local dead zones compared to denser particles for the bi-dispersed mixture. We have also observed that with the increase in percentage of heavier particles in the bi-dispersed mixture, the average particle velocity decreases for the same Reynolds number (Re ). In present work, we will also investigate the effect of particle size ratio in bi-dispersed mixture on local particle and flow behaviour