Author(s)

I. Diego, J. Toraño, S. Torno & B. García

Abstract

The international commerce of raw materials is growing every year at a high rate. Hugh amounts of granular materials are moved around the world and thus increase the need of storage space. Usually the stockage yards where the materials lay are installed in an open air, so the potential to create dust emissions due to wind blows is high, then generating operative and environmental problems. In order to quantify these emissions a series of scaled experiments to simulate air flows and dust emission around conical shaped piles of granulated materials stored in open areas have been developed. These experiments are then used to validate CFD models of the phenomena. In a first phase the experiments gave the possibility to effectively measure the flow patterns and the dust emission around conical material piles. A Lagrangian Multiphase model was implemented in CFD commercial code Ansys CFX 10.0, that successfully simulated the emission of dust as compared to experimental data. In the second phase, to be shown in this paper, metallic barriers are installed surrounding the piles, and flow characteristics and dust emission are measured through the use of hot-wire anemometers and light scattering instruments as well as simulated in the CFD package. The paper shows how k-epsilon turbulence models are accurate enough to simulate the air flow in affordable mesh resolutions and computing times. The superficial velocity contours over the cone face are also studied in order to obtain the degree of dust emission diminishing expected due to the barrier installation. These studies have been done in the framework of the Research Project CTM2005-00187/TECNO, \“Prediction models and prevention systems in the particle atmospheric contamination in an industrial environment” of the Spanish National R+D Plan of the Ministry of Education and Science, 2004-2007 period. Keywords: storage piles, wind tunnel, CFD Lagrangian methods, turbulence.

Keywords

storage piles, wind tunnel, CFD Lagrangian methods, turbulence.