Reacting Flow: Advanced CFD Training Package — Ep 06
Wet Combustion by DPM Combusting Particles
- Lesson
- 06
- Run Time
- 29m 50s
- Published
- Sep 5, 2026
- Category
- Reacting Flow
- Course Progress
- 0%
Wet Combustion Using DPM Combusting Particle, ANSYS Fluent Training
Description
This project simulates the wet combustion of anthracite particles within a combustion chamber using ANSYS Fluent, combining the Discrete Phase Model (DPM) with the Species Transport model to capture the full combustion process — from particle devolatilization through oxidation, producing carbon dioxide and water vapor as reaction products.
The geometry was designed in Design Modeler and meshed in ANSYS Meshing using an unstructured grid, subsequently converted into polyhedral cells to reduce computational cost while preserving mesh quality.
Methodology
Anthracite particles were modeled with a 2% liquid fraction and injected over a 0.5-second duration, using non-spherical particle shapes combined with a Rosin-Rammler diameter distribution to represent realistic fuel particle behavior. As the particles heat up within the chamber, they undergo devolatilization, releasing volatile fractions that subsequently oxidize alongside the remaining particle mass.
The Species Transport model tracks this multi-component reaction process, capturing the release and oxidation of volatiles and the resulting production of carbon dioxide and water vapor, while the coupled DPM framework tracks each particle's individual heating, devolatilization, and combustion behavior throughout its trajectory in the domain.
Conclusion
The simulation captures the complete combustion pathway of the anthracite particles, from initial heating through devolatilization and final oxidation, with chamber temperatures reaching as high as 2400 K as combustion proceeds. The resulting temperature and species distribution fields illustrate how particle-scale combustion dynamics — driven by particle size distribution, volatile release timing, and oxidation behavior — collectively shape the chamber's overall thermal and chemical environment, providing insight directly applicable to industrial coal, biomass, and waste combustion system design.