CFD Simulation of Solids Supension at High Loading

Predicting the power consumption during solid suspensions remains of key importance in many chemical and Oil & gas related stirred vessel designs. Such predictive capability is essential in scale-up of vessels, especially when the solids loading is high. Multiphase CFD-simulations are employed to gain such predictive capability.

In this work, power consumption for a varying degree solids (concentration of solids) suspended in a benchtop stirred vessel was calculated from CFD simulations with commercial code STAR-CCM+.  A polyhedral mesh with prism layers was used. The solids were modeled using the granular pressure and granular temperature transport model in the Eulerian multiphase framework.

Details of the models used and mesh configurations along with results will be presented. The results indicated promising utilization of CFD in design and scale-up of multiphase systems.