CFD Simulation of a Single Phase Liquid Flow across a Bluff Body

Abstract

Predicting the characteristic behavior of fluids as they flow across a bluff body is important in several industries including process, food, chemical and oil & gas industries. The bluff body is used to actuate the flow in other to simulate the effects of such flow across flow meters and other invasive measurement probes that may disturb the flow of fluid in a pipe. In this work, a simple bluff body which mimics the converging side of a typical venture meter is used. ANSYS CFD Fluent is used to simulate the flow while GAMBIT was used to generate the geometry of the bluff body. The Semi-Implicit Method for Pressure Linked Equation (SIMPLE) is used to simulate the flow across the bluff body. The standard k-epsilon model is used for the turbulence modelling in the study. 25 mm Upstream of the bluff body, it is observed that the pressure increased as the velocity increases, however, downstream, it is observed that just behind the bluff body’s wedge, the pressure remained constant for the three flowrates simulated. Key Words: Pressure contours; velocity contours; Mesh, Geometry; Turbulence model; Upstream; Downstream