Secondary Motion of Non-Spherical Particles in Gas Solid Flows

Objective of this study is to investigate the effect of secondary motion of particles in multiphase gas-solid flows parametrically and test the relative impacts of particle shape and orientation information on particle distribution. For that purpose, predictive accuracies of simplified drag coefficient models are assessed for the conditions relevant to a wood recovery plant operating at dilute flow regime. After demonstrating the strong impact of the shape and orientation information on the force balance for single particles, we compared the steady state Eulerian-Lagrangian simulation results for particle volume fractions, residence times and particle diameter distributions within the chamber for different (i) superficial gas velocities (5 m/s, 7.5 m/s), (ii) orientation tendencies and (iii) particle shapes. Transient simulations are performed until the system reaches steady state conditions by monitoring the mass flow rates of the particulate phases leaving the chamber. The secondary motion of non-spherical particles is represented by stochastic sampling from the available experimental data. Analysis of the force balance on single particles revealed log-scale variations if the orientation of the particles with respect to flow fluctuates. Variations in the single particle force balances are found to be still visible in the CFD analysis, where the secondary motion of particles drastically changed the particle distribution in the chamber. The native non-spherical model which only accounts for the shape correction was found to over-predict the entrainment, leading to a significantly different particle volume fraction and diameter distributions. Spherical particle assumption also caused significant errors in the particle distribution, which increases as aspect ratio of the cylindrical particle diverges from one. Results show that particle orientation statistics are extremely important to capture the particle mixing and segregation patterns at dilute regime, which cannot be captured with such simplifying assumptions.