Erosion Front Patterns in Pulse Jet Mixed Vessels
Authors: Pease Leonard F. , Bamberger Judith Ann , Minette Michael J. 
Published: January 2018

Here we observe the spatial and temporal patterns that erosion fronts driven by pulsed radial wall jets develop in double ring arrays of pulse tubes within slurry mixing vessels with curved bottoms. Although erosion of unbounded particle beds driven by individual steady jets has been studied for decades, the patterns developed within mixing vessels as neighboring transient erosion fronts collide and the subsequent relaxation of the particle bed towards the vessel center when the jets stop (i.e., as the pulse tubes refill within mixing vessels) remain incompletely understood. Relaxation here refers to motion of fluidized particle beds that were driven toward the vessel seam by radial wall jets that subsequently return or relax from the seam toward the center of the vessel when the jets turn off. Relaxation does not refer to downward individual or hindered particle settling. Spatial variations in the particle bed due to these relaxing particle beds comprise an important “initial” condition to the mathematical description of the evolution of the jet driven erosion front, and erosion fronts other than the one that expands radially from the pulse tube axis have only recently been described. For example, Bamberger, et al. (2017) [9], recently evaluated five selected cases of erosion patterns found in vessels 15 and 70 inches in diameter with 2:1 semi-elliptical bottoms. A highlight of that study was the discovery of a second type of erosion front that forms at the plane of symmetry between two adjacent pulse tubes. As neighboring radial wall jets collide they form an upwelling sheet of fluid; this second type of erosion front forms immediately beneath this upwelling flow. However, variations in this type of planar erosion front have not been cataloged previously.

In this study, we systematically probe the erosion fronts driven by these upwelling sheets in greater detail and evaluate the relaxation of the particle bed to its “initial” condition after the pulse ceases. Variations in the erosion patterns and particle bed relaxation are evaluated as a function of particle concentration, density, and size. This study specifically focusses on video images collected from the 15 inch vessel because it provides distinctive visualization of erosion pattern behavior. We find the upwelling sheets to be more influential on the erosion patterns at lower particle concentrations, making these findings particularly important to low solids concentration vessels. At lower particle concentrations, flow at the base of the plane of symmetry readily erodes particle beds. At higher particle concentrations, piles of unmobilized solids accumulate beneath colliding jets either because the erosion mechanism vanishes or because erosion at the plane of symmetry is slow compared to radial erosion. We also find that the upwelling sheets introduce a flow that drives erosion patterns from outer ring jets toward the vessel center along the curved vessel floor along the plane of symmetry between nozzles.

We further find that the rate of particle bed relaxation back toward the vessel center after the pulse ceases may correlate with concentration, particle density, and size. Higher concentrations and particle densities relax faster. The rate at which the entire bed relaxes toward the vessel center is faster near the vessel seam but slows as the relaxing front approaches the vessel center. This paper discusses competing mechanisms to explain these observations, including particle rolling, bed avalanches, gravity driven fluidized bed motion, and suspended particle sedimentation.