An Eulerian-Eulerian CFD Simulation of Air-Water Flow in a Pipe Separator

Abstract

This paper presents a three dimensional Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) of air-water flow using Eulerian –Eulerian multiphase model and RSM mixture turbulence model to investigate its hydrodynamic flow behaviour in a 30 mm pipe separator. The simulated results are then compared with the stereoscopic PIV measurements at different axial positions. The comparison shows that the velocity distribution can be predicted with high accuracy using CFD. The numerical velocity profiles are also found to be in good qualitative agreement with the experimental measurements. However, there were some discrepancies between the CFD results and the SPIV measurements at some axial positions away from the inlet section. Therefore, the CFD model could provide good physical understanding on the hydrodynamics flow behaviour for air-water in a pipe separator.