Bibliographic citations
Cárdenas, C., (2019). Modelamiento y simulación de un sistema de flujo bifásico en el interior de un tanque airlift de circulación interna usando dinámica de fluidos computacional [Tesis, Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería]. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14076/19698
Cárdenas, C., Modelamiento y simulación de un sistema de flujo bifásico en el interior de un tanque airlift de circulación interna usando dinámica de fluidos computacional [Tesis]. PE: Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería; 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14076/19698
@mastersthesis{sunedu/3502868,
title = "Modelamiento y simulación de un sistema de flujo bifásico en el interior de un tanque airlift de circulación interna usando dinámica de fluidos computacional",
author = "Cárdenas Alvarez, Christian Benito",
publisher = "Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería",
year = "2019"
}
Currently in Peru, mining is one of the most important activities because it generates economic income to the country. However, its raw material is increasingly scarce and you have to resort to optimized physicochemical processes that allow you to obtain valuable metals from increasingly complex minerals to be processed. For this, some mining companies use agitated tanks that allow the leaching process (extraction of a soluble constituent of a solid by means of a solvent), traditionally carried out by battery percolation, to intensify and accelerate. One of these tanks, called airlift, (because it carries out a transport through the use of air) achieves the suspension of the mineral and its mixture with the leaching solution from only an air injection. Two important areas of the airlift tank are the riser and the downcomer, the riser is the area of the airlift tank where the fluid system ascends and the downcomer is the area where it descends. Seen from the physical point of view, this process behaves like the flow of a multiphase fluid, so, by using the fluid dynamics equations, we can describe and predict its behavior. However, systems of nonlinear differential equations of fluid dynamics take on very complex forms in real situations. Its resolution in these cases must be given numerically. To do this, we must resort to appropriate solution methods for resolution, such as computational fluid dynamics. The objective of this work is to determine a suitable model to simulate the behavior of a two-phase liquid-gas flow system inside the airlift tank. Although a two-phase system is a simplification that does not represent all the physics of a three-phase reactive system as in a leaching of minerals, the results found here partially foreshadow them and allow for valuable conclusions of modeling and simulation whose obtaining would be drastically difficult to deal with the problem in its maximum complexity. One of the methods to solve this problem is the use of an Euler-Euler approach, which reproduces the case of flows with continuous phases. With the selected approach, the Eulerian model was used, which is the most appropriate for systems where there is an air intake in the form of bubbles and there are considerable volumetric fraction values, a model is said to be Eulerian because the speed will depend on spatial coordinates, in the same way is for the Euler-Euler approach. A turbulence model was also used for real cases. In this work, the k-ε realizable turbulence model was used. The main results we obtained were the speed of the liquid in the riser zone and the volumetric fractions in the riser and downcomer zones. These are important results for, for example, the selection of the dimensions of the tank to be used. The final result when the input conditions were the volumetric flow of 3.33 x 10-4 m3/s, the bubble diameter of 0.009 m and the drag factor of 2.75 indicated that: liquid velocity in the riser zone of 0.335 m/s, volumetric fractions in the riser and downcomer zones of 0.046 and 0.026 respectively, while the experimental values of the bibliographic source used for comparison were 0.420 m/s, 0.075 m/s and 0.020 m/s respectively. We also compare them with computational results extracted from the literature, which were 0.390 m/s, 0.055 m/s and 0.032 m/s. This reveals that two of the parameters calculated by our model give very satisfactory values. The computational tool developed here is now a useful ally for the design of equipment and processes that are carried out in airlifts tanks.
This item is licensed under a Creative Commons License