Tingwen Li

Numerical Simulation of an Evaporative Spray in a Gas-Solid Crossflow

Evaporative liquid feeds are often introduced into gas-solid systems through horizontal nozzles in many industry applications. The interactions of gas, particles and evaporative spray play key roles in affecting process efficiency and product quality. Good understanding of the fundamental hydrodynamics of this phenomenon is essential to the design improvement and process optimization. In this work, an Eulerian multi-fluid model for evaporative spray in gas-solid flows is proposed and a three-dimensional numerical simulation of a gas-liquid nitrogen jet in a uniform gas-solid crossflow is performed. In this model, the droplet evaporation and interphase heat transfer are modeled with appropriate semi-empirical correlations. Detailed numerical results of the flow field are obtained and the predicted temperature distribution is compared with experimental measurements in the literature. The evaporative spray jet is investigated under different particles loadings and the effect of spray evaporation on the flow behavior is discussed. Finally, parametric studies are conducted to evaluate the effects of droplet size, jet velocity on the jet behavior.