UGKWP for three-dimensional simulation of gas-particle fluidized bed

TL;DR

This paper extends a multi-scale gas-kinetic wave-particle method to three-dimensional simulation of gas-particle fluidized beds, accurately capturing complex flow features without prior phase separation.

Contribution

The novel GKS-UGKWP method seamlessly unifies wave and particle models based on local Knudsen number, enabling efficient and accurate 3D simulation of fluidized beds.

Findings

Successfully simulated 3D fluidized bed cases

Results agree well with experimental data

Captured heterogeneous flow features effectively

Abstract

The gas-solid particle two-phase flow in a fluidized bed shows complex physics. Following our previous work, the multi-scale framework based on gas-kinetic scheme (GKS) and unified gas-kinetic wave-particle method (UGKWP) for the gas-particle system is firstly extended to the three-dimensional simulation of the fluidized bed. For the solid particle evolution, different from the widely-used Eulerian and Lagrangian approaches, the UGKWP unifies the wave (dense particle region) and discrete particle (dilute particle region) formulation seamlessly according to a continuous variation of particle cell's Kundsen number ($Kn$). The GKS-UGKWP for the coupled gas-particle evolution system can automatically become an Eulerian-Eulerian (EE) method in the high particle collision regime and Eulerian-Lagrangian (EL) formulation in the collisionless particle regime. In the transition regime, the UGKWP can achieve a smooth transition between the Eulerian and Lagrangian limiting formulation. More importantly, the weights of mass distributions from analytical wave and discrete particle are related to the local $Kn$ by $\exp(-1/Kn)$ for wave and $(1-\exp(-1/Kn))$ for discrete particle. As a result, the UGKWP provides an optimal modeling for capturing the particle phase in terms of physical accuracy and numerical efficiency. In the numerical simulation, the UGKWP does not need any prior division of dilute/dense regions, which makes it suitable for the fluidized bed problem, where the dilute/transition/dense regions instantaneously coexist and are dynamically interconvertible. In this paper, based on the GKS-UGKWP formulation two lab-scale fluidization cases are simulated in 3D and the simulation results are compared with the experimental measurements. The typical heterogeneous flow features of the fluidized bed are well captured and the statistics are in good agreement with experiment data.