Estimation of turbulent fragmenting forces in a high-pressure homogenizer from computational fluid dynamics

The aim of this study was to find models for turbulent fragmenting forces in the high-pressure homogeniser from data available in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations with Reynolds Averaged Navier Stokes (RANS) turbulence models. In addition to the more common RANS k-epsilon turbulence models, a Multi-scale k-epsilon model was tested since experimental investigations of the geometry imply large differences in behaviour between turbulent eddies of different length-scales. Empiric models for the driving hydrodynamic factors for turbulent fragmentation using the extra information given by multi-scale simulations were developed. These models are shown to give a more reasonable approximation of local fragmentation than models based on the previously used RANS k-epsilon models when comparing to hydrodynamic measurements in an experimental model. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.