Abstract

The Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) code, Fluent, is employed to simulate the flow phenomena inside the annular foam breaker in order to improve its performance. The numerical simulation results show that the value and the distribution of the negative pressure are very important for the annular foam breaker. The design of the Laval nozzle not only can increase the fluid velocity, but also can reduce the pressure value from -30.2 to -50.3 kPa compared with the common annular nozzle foam breaker. In order to improve the range of the internal negative pressure, the two-stage Laval annular foam breaker is designed in this study. The analysis results show the distance between the two annular slit have greatly influence on its performance. There is a small overlap area between the two negative pressure zones generated by the two annular slits. The smaller the value distance is, the larger the overlap zone is. When the value of the distance decreases to 50 mm, the minimum negative pressure can be reduced to approximately -65.5 kPa. Meanwhile, the range of the internal negative pressure is larger than the single Laval annular foam breaker, which is benefit to break foam.

Keywords:

Annular foam breaker, CFD analysis, coanda effect, foam drilling, laval nozzle,

References

Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests.

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Copyright

The authors have no competing interests.