Effect of turbulence modeling on hydrodynamics of a turbulent contact absorber

A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) study is conducted to find a suitable two equation turbulence model for accurate prediction of hydrodynamics of an inhouse turbulence contact absorber (TCA) at high gas and liquid velocities. Based on the multi-fluid Eulerian approach, hydrodynamics of TCA is simulated by incorporating three turbulence models i.e. standard k-epsilon model, RNG k-epsilon model and SST k-omega model in ANSYS Fluent (R). The solid phase stresses were closed by using the kinetic theory of granular flows (KTGF). TCA hydrodynamics parameters; expanded bed height and bed pressure drop were used to compare the results of this study with experimental data and also with earlier numerical study published with laminar viscous model. It was found that the RNG k-epsilon model predicted the bed height and pressure drop better than its counterparts. To accurately find the effects of secondary phase turbulence, two RNG k-epsilon model options i-e. per phase and dispersed were also evaluated. The results show that the per phase option of RNG k-epsilon model produced the expanded bed height and pressure drop in close agreement with available experimental data at similar operating conditions.