Evaluation of Multiphase Approaches and Turbulence Models for Industrial CFD Simulation of Stirred Bubble Column Reactors

Abstract In this work, stirred bubble column simulation has been performed by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) technique. To this aim, Eulerian multiphase approach and algebraic slip mixture model (ASM) has been considered in terms of large-scale CFD simulations computational time. Simulations have been performed for three cases. The first case is ASM approach with Spalart-Allmaras (S-A) turbulence model, the second is ASM approach with Standard k-ε turbulence model and the last one is Eulerian approach with Standard k-ε turbulence model. Geometrical and operational parameters have been taken from Aubin et al. (2004) to verify simulation results with their experimental data. The results show that the radial profile of axial fluid velocity in each case has good agreement with experimental data. The results illustrate, almost with reasonable accuracy, using of ASM approach reduces the computation time near 20 percent, on the other hand, implementation of S-A turbulence models decreases the simulation time close to 25 percent respect to k-ε model. This reduction in computation time is very useful for large scale simulation