Granular flow particle turbulence model

In another class of models, pioneered by Elghobashi and Abou-Arab (1983) and Chen (1985), a particle turbulent viscosity, derived by extending the concept of turbulence from the gas phase to the solid phase, has been used. This is the so-called k—s model, where the k corresponds to the granular temperature and s is a dissipation parameter for which another conservation law is required. By coupling with the gas phase k—s turbulence model, Zhou and Huang (1990) developed a k—s model for turbulent gas-particle flows. The k—s models do not... 

It must be noted here that most industrial fluidized bed reactors operate in a turbulent flow regime. Trajectory simulations of individual particles in a turbulent field may become quite complicated and time consuming. Details of models used to account for the influence of turbulence on particle trajectories are discussed in Chapter 4. These complications and constraints on available computational resources may restrict the number of particles considered in DPM simulations. Eulerian-Eulerian approaches based on the kinetic theory of granular flows may be more suitable to model such cases. Application of this approach to simulations of fluidized beds is discussed below. 

In most gas-particle flow situations occurring in fluidized bed reactors, a standard k — e turbulence model is used to describe the turbulence in the continuous phase whereas a separate transport equation is formulated for the kinetic energy (or granular temperature) of the particulate phase [122, 42, 41, 165, 84, 52]. Further details on granular flows are given in chap 4. 

In this section the application of multiphase flow theory to model the performance of fluidized bed reactors is outlined. A number of models for fluidized bed reactor flows have been established based on solving the average fundamental continuity, momentum and turbulent kinetic energy equations. The conventional granular flow theory for dense beds has been reviewed in chap 4. However, the majority of the papers published on this topic still focus on pure gas-particle flows, intending to develop closures that are able to predict the important flow phenomena observed analyzing experimental data. Very few attempts have been made to predict the performance of chemical reactive processes using this type of model. 

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