A Dynamic Coarse Grain Discrete Element Method for Gas-Solid Fluidized Beds by Considering Particle-Group Crushing and Polymerization

The discrete element method (DEM) coupled with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is used extensively for the numerical simulation of gas-solid fluidized beds. In order to improve the efficiency of this approach, a coarse grain model of the DEM was proposed in the literature. In this model, a group of original particles are treated as a large-sized particle based on the initial particle distribution, and during the whole simulation process the number and components of these particle-groups remain unchanged. However, collisions between particles can lead to frequent crushing and polymerization of particle-groups. This fact has typically been ignored, so the purpose of this paper is to rationalize the coarse grain DEM-CFD model by considering the dynamic particle-group crushing and polymerization. In particular, the effective size of each particle-group is measured by a quantity called equivalent particle-group diameter, whose definition references the equivalent cluster diameter used by the energy-minimization multi-scale (EMMS) model. Then a particle-group crushing criterion is presented based on the mismatch between the equivalent diameter and actual diameter of a particle-group. As to the polymerization of two colliding particle-groups, their velocity difference after collision is chosen as a criterion. Moreover, considering the flow heterogeneity induced by the particle cluster formation, the EMMS drag force model is adopted in this work. Simulations are carried out by using a finite volume method (FVM) with non-staggered grids. For decoupling the Navier-Stokes equations, the semi-implicit method for pressure linked equations revised (SIMPLER) algorithm is used. The simulation results show that the proposed dynamic coarse grain DEM-CFD method has better performance than the original one.