Thermo-mechanical modeling of turbulent heat transfer in gas–solid flows including particle collisions

A thermo-mechanical turbulence model is developed and used for predicting heat transfer in a gas–solid flow through a vertical pipe with constant wall heat flux. The new four-way interaction model makes use of the thermal kθ–τθ equations, in addition to the hydrodynamic k–τ transport, and accounts for the particle–particle and particle–wall collisions through a Eulerian/Lagrangian formulation. The simulation results indicate that the level of thermal turbulence intensity and the heat transfer are strongly affected by the particle collisions. Inter-particle collisions attenuate the thermal turbulence intensity near the wall but somewhat amplify the temperature fluctuations in the pipe core region. The hydrodynamic-to-thermal times-scale ratio and the turbulent Prandtl number in the region near the wall increase due to the inter-particle collisions. The results also show that the use of a constant or the single-phase gas turbulent Prandtl number produces error in the thermal eddy diffusivity and thermal turbulent intensity fields. Simulation results also indicate that the inter-particle contact heat conduction during collision has no significant effect in the range of Reynolds number and particle diameter studied.