CFD modelling of the aerodynamics in a solar-enhanced vortex gasifier (SVG) - Part I. Validation case

A Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) model of a solarenhanced vortex gasifier (SVG) has been developed. The SVG developed by Professor Aldo Steinfeld’s group at ETH Zurich employs a critical quartz window to keep particles in the reactor and control the atmosphere. The motivation for the development of a CFD model is to allow the aerodynamics in the SVG to be optimised and prevent particles from depositing on the quartz window. The present paper reports the validation of the CFD model for an isothermal flow in a solar chemical reactor, chosen due to the lack of data under reacting conditions. The solar chemical reactor chosen for validation has similar swirling flow patterns to those in the SVG and measurements of velocity in this chemical reactor are available in literature. Three turbulence models, namely, a Baseline (BSL) Reynolds Stress model, Speziale, Sarkar and Gatski (SSG) Reynolds Stress model and Shear-Stress-Transport (SST) model are used to simulate the flows in the solar chemical reactor. It is found that the prediction of all three models are in reasonable agreement with the experimental data while the prediction of the BSL and SSG models are slightly better than that of the SST model. The BSL model is also being used to predict the flow in the SVG and some preliminary results are reported in the accompanying paper also presented at the conference.