CFD Simulation of Multiphase Flow by Mud Agitator in Drilling Mud Mixing System

Abstract

In this study, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation based on an Eulerian-Eulerian approach was used to evaluate the mixing performance of a mud agitator through the distribution of bulk particles. Firstly, the commercial CFD software Star-CCM+ was verified by performing numerical simulations of single-phase water mixing problems in an agitator with various turbulence models, and the simulation results were compared with an experiment. The standard model was selected as an appropriate turbulence model, and a grid convergence test was performed. Then, a simulation of the liquid-solid multi-phase mixing in an agitator was simulated with different multi-phase interaction models, and lift and drag models were selected. In the case of the lift model, the results were not significantly affected, but Syamlal and O’Brien’s drag model showed more reasonable results with respect to the experiment. Finally, with the properly determined simulation conditions, a multi-phase flow simulation of a mud agitator was performed to predict the mixing time and spatial distribution of solid particles. The applicability of the CFD multi-phase simulation for the practical design of a mud agitator was confirmed. Received 1 February 2021, revised 3 March 2021, accepted 11 March 2021 Corresponding author Jong-Chun Park: +82-51-510-2480, jcpark@pnu.edu c 2021, The Korean Society of Ocean Engineers This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution non-commercial license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.