Simulation of dilute pneumatic conveying with different types of bends by CFD-DEM

Bends are one of the most commonly used facilities to change flow direction in pneumatic conveying. It is important to understand the effect of the bend to the gas-solid flow structures in a pneumatic conveying system. CFD-DEM is one of powerful methods to study the fundamentals of gas-solid flow, as it takes the particle-particle and particle-wall collisions into account. But the time consumption is one of major limitations for its application. In this paper, a three-dimensional CFD-DEM model which ignores the effect of void fraction to the gas phase is used to simulate the dilute gas-solid flow. Gas-solid flows in different types of bends including horizontal-vertical, vertical-horizontal and horizontal-horizontal 90° bends are studied. The present CFD-DEM model is verified by compared the rope structure with the result for traditional CFD-DEM model in horizontal-vertical case. Compared the particle rope dispersion in different types of bends, the rope disperses more quickly in the vertical-horizontal case than others, and the solid flow structure is the most complicated in the horizontal- horizontal case. As their various solid flow structures, the collision data of three cases also seem different