Study on Hydraulic Characteristic of the Tube Settler

Little information could be found about formulas and coefficients for calculating the head loss of tube settler, which makes it difficult for the designers to get the values. Herein, using computational fluid dynamics software FLUENT as the platform, the hydraulic characteristics involving in water flow regime, velocity distribution and pressure distribution of flow were studied via the standard k - epsilon. turbulence model with the SIMPLEC algorithm and numerical simulation on the flow in tube settler based on the assumptions that the free water surface remains flat as a stress-free plane of symmetry and the velocity distribution and free outflow are prescribed on inlet and outlet boundaries respectively. The head loss of the tube settler was obtained from the numerical simulation, which was in good agreement with the measurement for actual engineering. The method based on numerical simulation is a new and good approach to determine the head loss of tube settler.