Lanre Oshinowo, Fluent USA, ANSYS, Inc., 16350 Park Ten Place, Suite 204, Houston, TX 77084-5148, Akshat Agarwal, Fluent India Pvt Ltd, Plot No. 34/1, Pune Infotech Park, MIDC, Hinjewadi, Pune, 411057, India, and Sergio Vasquez, Fluent Europe, ANSYS, Inc., Sheffield Business Park, Europa Link, Sheffield, S9 1XU, United Kingdom.
In this paper, we investigate the application of the Eulerian multiphase model to the prediction of liquid-solid transport in horizontal and inclined pipelines. Solid-liquid flow is reported extensively in the literature for horizontal pipes; however, not much has been reported for arbitrarily oriented pipelines. For this work, the solid phase concentration ranges from dilute to dense producing a variety of flow regimes from full solids transport to moving or stationary bed conditions in the pipeline. The turbulent pipeline flow is modeled with the realizable k-e turbulence model with a blended wall function to reproduce the turbulent velocity profile at the wall from the viscous sub-layer through the buffer layer and into the turbulent core. The drag coefficient on the granular solid phase is corrected with the local turbulence dissipation rate. Because particle dispersion in pipeline transport is enhanced by turbulence, the inter-phase turbulence momentum transfer on the dispersion of the particulate phase is included in the analysis and is treated in two ways: a drift velocity correction in the turbulent drag term, and diffusion term in the volume fraction transport equation. The latter approach was found to be comparable to the former in predicting the solids distribution across the pipe and in the moving bed with the additional benefit of eliminating checker-boarding in the solids concentration field due to the weaker pressure gradients relative to the gradient of volume fraction for very dilute slurries. The Eulerian multiphase simulations are conducted in the commercial CFD code FLUENT. The predicted profiles of solids concentration in the pipe cross-section are shown to be in good agreement with correlations for horizontal pipes. From this basis, additional pipe orientations are evaluated and the flow regimes predicted.