Numerical investigation into the abrasive particle movement characteristics inside the swirling impeller nozzle based on the coupled SPH-FEM method

The swirling impeller nozzle is an emerging rock breakage device used for radial jet drilling in petroleum extraction. In this research, the coupled smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) with finite element method (FEM) is employed to study the abrasive particle movement characteristics inside the swirling impeller nozzle. Besides, the conical nozzle is studied as a comparison. The model is validated with the nozzle flow field visualization experiments, maximum error between the numerical model and the experiment is 13.49%. Macroscopic characteristics of the nozzle flow field are illustrated firstly. Then, the abrasive movement trajectory and the axial/radial/tangential motion characteristics inside the nozzle are analyzed. Finally, an improved impeller with an innovative upper end-face structure is proposed. The improved impeller exhibits a low flow resistance, the diffusion angle is 1.37 times of the original impeller and the final abrasive particle kinetical energy of it increases by 637.5%.