Eulerian-Eulerian large eddy simulation of two-phase dilute bubbly flows

Abstract An efficient mathematical model is presented for conducting large eddy simulation (LES) of turbulent bubbly flows at low gas hold-ups. The mathematical model is based on the filtered multi-fluid equations derived by application of the component-weighted volume-averaging process of each phase. A two-fluid model is applied to the filtered set of equations, yielding a more computationally tractable set of filtered equations. The filtered equations are formulated in generalized curvilinear coordinates to simulate turbulent gas-liquid bubbly flows in complex geometries. The Germano model is used to account for sub-grid turbulent stresses. The gas and liquid momentum equations are discretized with the hybrid staggered/non-staggered method. The performance of the developed mathematical model is demonstrated by simulating the benchmark test case of a turbulent gas-liquid bubbly flow in a rectangular bubble column. The accuracy of the proposed method is assessed via comparison with the experimental data and other numerical results in the literature.