Effect of Turbulence on Drag Force in Gas-Particle Two-Phase Flow

Effect of turbulence on drag force in gas-particle two-phase flow had been investigated using numerical simulation. In order to select an accurate turbulence model, some promising models, such as standard k-ε model, RNG k-ε model and Realizable k-ε model, had been examined through calculating the flow over a backward-facing step. RNG k-ε model performing better than others had been used to simulate the turbulence flow over a spherical particle. In computation, the turbulence intensity was ranged from 10% to 80%, and the turbulence length scale from 10⁻⁵m to 4m. Results show that the turbulence length scale had a small effect on the drag force, except at small length scale. Comparing with the drag on a particle in laminar flow, the turbulence intensity enhances it comparatively, especially at small particle Reynolds numbers, which differs from the previous publications.