Numerical investigation of ice slurry isothermal flow in various pipes

Ice slurry is an energy-intensive secondary fluid which may play an important role in various cooling purposes. Knowing detailed flow information of ice slurry is of paramount importance from the system design point of view. The present study applies an Euler–Euler computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model based on the kinetic theory of granular flow to describe the ice slurry flow without considering ice melting. The Euler–Euler CFD model was firstly validated by four different experiments. Then the validated Euler–Euler CFD model was applied to solve the distributions of ice slurry flow, ice particle concentration and pressure drop in horizontal, vertical and 90° elbow pipes respectively. The relative errors of the numerical computation are within ±20% with respect to the measurements. And the Euler–Euler CFD model is validated to be a more effective and universal model for describing ice slurry flow and can supply plentiful parametric information in the flow region.

► An Euler–Euler CFD model is applied to describe ice slurry flow without melting.
► A series of parametric information in horizontal, vertical and elbow flow is acquired.
► The current numerical model achieves good balance between precision and universality.