Dense Solid-Liquid Off-Bottom Suspension Dynamics: Simulation and Experiment

Dense solid-liquid off-bottom suspension inside a baffled mechanically agitated stirred tank equipped with a standard Rushton turbine is investigated. Dynamic evolution of the suspension from start up to steady state conditions has been inspected by both visual experiments and computational fluid dynamics. A classical Eulerian-Eulerian Multi Fluid Model along with the “homogeneous” k-epsilon turbulence model is adopted to simulate suspension dynamics. In these systems the drag inter-phase force affects both solids suspension and distribution. Therefore, different computational approaches are tested in order to compute this term. Simulation results are compared with images acquired on the real system and a good agreement is found.