Venturi scrubbers are very attractive devices for gas cleaning in industrial facilities, from small scale textile plants to large scale power plants. They may also be used combining the cleaning capabilities with cooling and humidification process.
The difficulty in studying venturi scrubbers arises from the complexity of its flow. It is a multiphase mixture of gas, droplets, and dust particles with multiple interactions between the various phases including: liquid atomization, droplet breakup, collision and coalescence, in addition to interactions between liquid droplets and dust particles.
Amongst the various (phenomenological) models that have been proposed, the authors have developed an integral boundary layer model, applicable to the diverging section of the venturi. This has proved to be very successful in predicting the pressure drop for a wide range of venturis.
Because phenomenological methods have limits on the performance prediction when the venturi geometry or the operation condition changes, attempts have been made to implement other computational models in venturi scrubbers. Computational Fluid Dynamics techniques can provide detailed information of the flow pattern in the venturi. The present paper reports the development of an Eulerian-Lagrangian model for the two phase flow in a large-scale venturi with a diameter ratio of 122.5/250 mm and the half angles for the converging and diverging sections are 17° and 5°, respectively.
The experimental data are published elsewhere and are used in the present work to validate the CFD model presented.
