Heterogeneous ice slurry flow and concentration distribution in horizontal pipes

• A Mixture CFD model is applied to describe heterogeneous ice slurry flow.
• The ice slurry rheological behavior is considered piecewise.
• The coupled flow and concentration profiles in heterogeneous slurry flow is acquired.
• The current numerical model achieves good balance between precision and universality.

Ice slurry is an energy-intensive solid–liquid mixture fluid which may play an important role in various cooling purposes. Knowing detailed flow information is important from the system design point of view. However, the heterogeneous ice slurry flow makes it difficult to be quantified due to the complex two phase flow characteristic. The present study applies a Mixture computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model based on different rheological behavior to characterize the heterogeneous ice slurry flow. The Mixture CFD model was firstly validated by three different experiments. Then the validated Mixture CFD model was applied to solve the ice slurry isothermal flow by considering the rheological behavior piecewise. Finally, the numerical solutions have displayed the coupled flow information, such as slurry velocity, ice particle concentration and pressure drop distribution. The results show that, the ice slurry flow distribution will appear varying degree of asymmetry under different operating conditions. The rheological behavior will be affected by the asymmetric flow distributions. When mean flow velocity is high, Thomas equation can be appropriate for describing ice slurry viscosity. While with the decreasing of mean flow velocity, the ice slurry behaves Bingham rheology. As compared with experimental pressure drop results, the relative errors of numerical computation are almost within ±15%. The Mixture CFD model is validated to be an effective model for describing heterogeneous ice slurry flow and could supply plentiful flow information.