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This paper presents an experimental and numerical study of the freezing-thawing behavior of water in fully saturated sand. A relatively inexpensive and easily replicable experimental procedure was developed to simulate the freezing-thawing cycles in a medium-sized sand sample placed in a modified commercial freezer. By insulating the sides and bottom of the sample well, while allowing good thermal conductivity at the top of the sample, a nearly vertical advance of the freezing and thawing front was achieved. A series of freeze-thaw cycles were performed with higher and lower temperature gradients. A numerical multiphysics model, assuming an axially symmetric geometry based on the transient heat transfer during the phase transition, used a parametric approach to estimate the effective thermal properties of the sand-water-ice system. A good agreement between experimental and modelling results was shown, but slightly different parameter sets were obtained for each temperature gradient. The presented method could be a simple way to characterize the freeze-thaw process in natural and artificial porous materials.

This paper is concerned with the simulation of multiphase flow hydrodynamics in an experimental oxyfuel fluidized bed combustor designed for biomass fuels. The aim is to perform cross-validation between several models and solvers that differ in the description of some phenomena in question. We focus on the influence of turbulence modeling, inter-phase drag force models, the presence of biomass in the mixture. Also the possibility to simplify the full 3D description to a quasi-1D model is tested. However, the results indicate that such simplification is not suitable for chaotic phenomena in considered scenarios. The models were developed using ANSYS Fluent and OpenFOAM CFD software packages as well as our in-house CFD code CFBSim. The quantities relevant for comparison (the densities of the dispersed solid phases and the phase velocities) are presented in the form of cross-section averaged vertical profiles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article studies a time dependent mathematical model of two-dimensional two-phase system describing a cross-section of saturated soil sample in terms of its temperature. The model is used to control the structural conditions in the medium by coupling it with the Navier equations. The computational studies of this coupling are presented at the end of the article. The thermal model setting and its variational formulation are presented as well as a basic analysis of mathematical properties of the partial problem solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]