Effect of Electromagnetic Field on Three-Phase Flow Behavior

Abstract

The multiphase transport phenomena frequently take place in metallurgical processes, for example, in the electrolysis process of magnesium, where there exists three-phase flow including liquid magnesium, molten electrolyte, and chlorine gas under the electromagnetic field. In this paper, the three-phase flow behaviors under the electromagnetic field in the advanced diaphragmless electrolytic cell were investigated by CFD simulation. The governing equations of the internal flow field in the electrolytic cell were established, where the standard k−e turbulence model and the VOF multiphase flow model were adopted for the comprehensive description of the flow characteristics of multiphase flow in the electrolytic cell, and the Lorentz force was added to the momentum equation of fluids as the momentum source term to combine the effect of electromagnetic field with the flow field. The order coupling method was adopted for the calculation of the coupled field. The numerical simulation on the three-phase flow field considering the effect of electromagnetic field was done using FLUENT6.3 software, the numerical simulations on the electric field and the magnetic field were carried out using Ansys 11.0 software, respectively, and the connection between the finite element software ANSYS and the control volume software Fluent was built using the user-defined function (UDF). According to the analysis on the distributions of the electromagnetic field and the flow field, the optimum flow circulation in the advanced diaphragmless electrolytic cell was obtained, which is very helpful for the design in the electrolysis process of molten magnesium salt.