One very often needs to predict the particle and dirt transport. That occurs at various scales ranging from small nozzles to large industrial separators. Sometimes the energy efficiency of particle removal is of the highest importance while in other cases the exact path of each object is of main interest (when designing fuel injection for instance).
It applies to dust, oil, water or paint droplets and wood scobs amongst many other substances.
CFD comes in useful also in this domain where on top of the fluid flow field one can predict the motion of discrete particles. Depending on the problem complexity it is possible to perform analyses ranging simple one-way-coupled simulations up to fully resolved particle dynamics with collisions and two-way body-flow coupling.
The particle transport CFD simulations cover:
- transportation of particulate material of varying size (from dust to a few-milimeter size wood scobs)
- charged particles in electric and magnetic fields
- motion of droplets, sprays and aerosols where another fluid is still treated as a particle
USER STORY
A large industrial separator manufacturer in south-west Poland asked our company to develop a custom particle transport model. In this way the CAD engineers from their company would run CFD simulations without need to learn the specialized CFD software.
A dedicated application for simulations that model the motion of wood scobs in the ventilation system was created. It comprises of flow simulation module based on OpenFOAM® and our own transport model written in MATLAB. Everything was wrapped in a dedicated GUI.
The computational mesh is created automatically based on the geometrical parameters of the desired design and previous calibration performed by our developers.