A. Sarkar, C. R. Wassgren, R. Kumar
American Institute of Chemical Engineers
AIChE Conference -2011 Annual Meeting
The one-dimensional form of the advection-diffusion equation has been used to model axial mixing in rotating drums in a number of studies. This work attempts to examine whether granular mixing in more complex geometries can be modeled using the three-dimensional form of the advection-diffusion equation. A horizontal, cylindrical granular mixer with rotating impeller blades is the system under consideration. The inputs required for the advection-diffusion model (convective velocities and diffusion coefficients) are obtained from a discrete element method (DEM) simulation of the granular mixer. The variation in concentration of a tracer species with location is computed using a finite difference numerical solution of the 3D advection-diffusion equation. The results obtained from the advection-diffusion model are compared against measurements from the DEM simulation, which is considered as the “exact solution”. This proposed methodology presents an efficient multi-scale modeling technique that uses measurements from short DEM simulations as inputs for predicting mixing performance over longer time scales.Access Conference Proceedings
advection-diffusion model, Mixing