Investigation of drag models in CFD modeling and comparison to experiments of liquid–solid fluidized systems

A liquid–solid fluidization system was investigated with Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) by using a transient Eulerian-Eulerian model. The study focused on various drag models between the phases and how the results vary when simulating the system 2-dimensional or 3-dimensional. Also the grid dependencies to the results were investigated. The simulation results were validated experimentally using a digital imaging method. The suitability of this experimental method is also investigated in this paper. The CFD results show that the outcome from different drag models vary considerably and therefore the used model has to be chosen with care.

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► Drag models are essential for estimating fluidization applications correctly.
► Various drag models were compared and validated against experimental data.
► The models show high dependency on the system where they were validated originally.
► Care must be used when choosing appropriate model.