Effect of Particle Size on the Characteristics of Sand Jets in Water

Abstract

Sand jets in water have extensive engineering applications. A detailed numerical modeling of sand jets in water was conducted at high initial sand concentration using a commercial computational fluid dynamics package (ANSYS CFX 11.0). The results of the numerical simulation were first compared with some recent laboratory experiments. Simulations were then conducted to investigate the effect of sand particle sizes on velocity distribution, concentration profile, and turbulent properties. Turbulent flow characteristics, such as turbulent kinetic energy, turbulence intensity, rate of energy dissipation, and turbulent eddy frequency, were evaluated and the trend compared with the previous studies in the literature. The location of maximum kinetic energy was found to be independent of particle size. The turbulent kinetic energy and rate of dissipation of the water phase decrease with increasing particle size.