Chemical Engineering Communications, Vol.203, No.9, 1139-1144, 2016
Primary Study of a Settling Fiber Particle in a Particle Cloud
Fiber particles have some unique behaviors due to their special shapes, which are important to those related industries. When a single fiber is in a particle cloud, its behavior will be influenced by others around it. Hence, the behavior of an isolated fiber particle will be different from that in a particle cloud, such as aggregation, orientation, and drag coefficient. However, little information is available on these phenomena, especially drag coefficient. Therefore, this article focuses on the settling process of a fiber particle in a particle cloud. Experiments were conducted to observe the settling behavior of fiber particles and to determine the drag coefficients of an isolated fiber particle in a particle cloud. The relationship between drag coefficient, orientation, and Re for different fiber particles is obtained, which is independent of volume concentration. It is further observed that the aspect ratio has little influence on the drag coefficients of fiber particles. By comparison, it is noticed that these relationships are similar to those found for an isolated single-fiber particle. Furthermore, the orientation of a fiber particle in a particle cloud fluctuates around the stable horizontal orientation in the same way as a single-fiber particle, but returns to the steady state more quickly.
Keywords:A fiber particle in a particle cloud;Aspect ratio;Drag coefficient;Particle concentration;Sedimentation