LAUSR

Abstract The deposition of Black Powder particles in gas pipelines is a critical industrial problem. Gas-solid flow in a pipe is simulated using the Reynolds Stress Model (RSM) and the Discrete Phase Model (DPM). In this study, 3D meshes for pipes with different orientations are considered. Vertical orientations were, also, considered although they are not as common as the horizontal pipeline in the gas industry. Efforts were made to predict an accurate turbulent flow field as a requirement for successful simulation of particle deposition velocity. A fine mesh was used to resolve the viscous sublayer and DNS or experimental profiles of the fluctuating velocities were imposed to minimize the inaccurate prediction of the RSM model to determine the fluctuating velocity needed for the particle trajectories. Black Powder particles, in the range 1–50 µm, were injected in the computational domain as mono-dispersed and poly-dispersed size distributions respectively. The spatial distribution of the particles, injected at the inlet of the three-dimensional pipe, was randomly varied with time to replicate realistic distributions. The predicted deposition velocity, presented a relatively good agreement with benchmark experiments from the literature. The trends of the deposition velocity curve in horizontal and vertical pipes are different. Ascending and descending vertical flows yield similar deposition velocity curves. In addition, the concentration decay was also obtained in order to determine the approximate distances that particles, with different diameters, can reach in pipelines.