| Multiphase flows have long been present in several industrial applications such as fluidized bed reactors, liquid-gas catalytic reactors, bitumen recovery from oil sands, etc.; thus improving their understanding and optimizing their performance have become very important subjects of investigation. The main objective of this numerical study is to simulate dispersed gas-liquid two-phase systems as they flow through a horizontal pipe in turbulent regime. Special interest is on describing the evolution of the bubble size distribution along the pipe, which has been found to be critical for the outcome of some of the above technological processes. Mixtures composed of bubbles of different sizes are handled using a combined Lagrangian-Eulerian approach that allows considering the specifics of the bubble-bubble interactions and bubble motion while simulating large-scale problems with commonly available computational resources. |
