A simulation of air-lift artificial upwelling in vertical pipe

The development of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) technology make people found the good point of compromise on the conflict of experiment and analysis, and air-lift artificial upwelling for deep ocean water efficiency is simulated with a simplified CFD model of two-phase flow in an upward pipe. The model is simulated in the two-dimensional space and based on the momentum transfer between the two phases. The influence of the pipe diameter and length on the lifting efficiency has been investigated numerically. It was shown that the increase of the pipe diameter leads to the increase of the lifting efficiency. However, with the increase of pipe length, the lifting efficiency of liquid was reduced slightly. The simulating results indicated that the parameter of pipe diameter is more sensitive than the pipe length. In addition, increasing the pipe length also led to the reduction of lifting efficiency due to the wall friction in stable full-blown flow field.