Modeling the influence of forced ventilation on the dispersion of droplets ejected from roadheader-mounted external sprayer

In order to reveal the influence of forced ventilation on the dispersion of droplets ejected from roadheader-mounted external sprayer, the paper studies the air-flowing field and the droplet distribution under the condition of gentle breeze and normal forced ventilation in heading face using the particle tracking technology of computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The results show that air-flowing tendency in the same section presents great comparability in the period of gentle breeze and forced ventilation, and the difference mainly embodies in the different wind velocity. The influence of ventilation on the dispersion of droplets is faint under the gentle breeze condition. The droplet can be evenly distributed around the cutting head. However, under the normal forced ventilation, a large number of droplets will drift to the return air side. At the same time, droplet clusters are predominantly presented in the lower part of windward side and the middle of the leeward side around the cutting head. In contrast, the droplet concentration in other parts around cutting head decreases a lot and the droplets are unable to form close-grained mist curtain. So the dust escape channel is formed. In addition, the simulation results also reveal that the disturbance of air flow on the droplet distribution can be effectively relieved when using ventilation duct with Coanda effect (VDCE). Field experiment results show that the dust suppression efficiency of total dust and respirable dust increases respectively by 10.5% and 9.3% when using VDCE, which proves that it can weaken the influence of airflow on droplet dispersion.