Solid-liquid flow in Stirred Tanks: Euler-Euler / RANS Modeling

Stirred tanks are widely used equipment to process solid-liquid dispersions in the chemical and minerals engineering industries. CFD simulations of such equipment on industrial scales are principally feasible within the Euler-Euler / RANS approach. Practical application, however, requires suitable closure models to account for phenomena on the scale of individual particles, which are not resolved in this approach. The present work applies a set of closure relations that originates from a comprehensive review of existing results from analytical, numerical, and experimental studies. Focus is on the modeling of interfacial forces which includes drag, lift, and turbulent dispersion. To validate the model a comprehensive set of experimental data including particle concentration as well as liquid velocity and turbulence has been assembled from different literature sources. The necessity for model extensions is confirmed via the comparison of simulation results obtained by different sets of closure correlations, i.e. the presently proposed one and others that have been frequently used in previous studies, with the experimental data.