Numerical Simulation of the Incompressible Turbulent Flow of a Binary Mixture of Air-Water Vapor: Applications in Drying Process

Abstract

-The present work deals with numerical simulation of the incompressible turbulent flow of a binary mixture air-water vapor inside channels. Calculations are performed using the RANS (Reynolds Average Navier-Stokes Equations) formulation in addition to the standart k-ε turbulence model. The mathematical model is discretized by a finite difference scheme, being adopted second order accurate expressions for both convection and diffusion terms. The mesh arrangement is collocated and artificial dissipation terms are added to control the odd-even decoupling problem. The numerical scheme is applied to solve the flow of a binary mixture of air-water vapor inside plane channels and sudden expansions. The validation performed indicates that the present method reproduces satisfactorily the literature data for both concentration profiles and Sherwood number. Furthermore, the parametric analysis performed indicates that the drying process (wall mass flux) is very sensitive to the flow parameters investigated, i.e., inlet flow velocity and channel expansion ratio.