Micromechanical modeling and analysis of pneumatic conveying

Pneumatic conveying is an important operation used in various industries for the transportation of granular materials from one place to another. This gas-solid flow system is affected by many variables related to material properties, operational and geometrical conditions, and its design and control are largely empirical. In order to better understand this flow system, the combined approach of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) for gas phase and discrete element method (DEM) for solid phase has been increasingly used to study it at a particle scale. This paper presents an overview of our studies in this direction. The model development is first discussed, following model validation against experimental results under different conditions. The application of the validated CFD-DEM model is then discussed in terms of the flow characteristics and the forces acting on particles, as well as the energy dissipations under different conditions. The results show that the CFD-DEM approach can be used not only for fundamental understanding but also for process design and control.