CFD Simulation of the Two-Phase Flow in a Novel Cooking Tank for Ethanol Production

As a key piece of equipment in bioethanol production, cooking tank is usually used to ensure the uniformity of liquefaction. In this paper, we propose a novel type of cooking tank to ensure a type of starch slurry flow known as a quasi-plug flow in a large-scale process. In the analyses of flow field, we used computational fluid dynamics (CFD). To simulate the liquid–solid two-phase flow, we chose a Euler–Euler model based on particle dynamics. We investigated the effects of several key structural parameters on the flow field. The results show that for a tank with 12,800 mm in height and 1000 mm in diameter, the optimized inlet tube angle and inlet tube diameter range from 0° to 45° and 0.125 to 0.15 D (diameter of cooking tank), respectively. We determined the optimum cone mouth diameter at the exit and its distance to the bottom to range from 0.18 to 0.30 D and 0.045 to 0.070 D , respectively. The analysis results suggest that the tank performs well when its aspect ratio ranges from 9.62 to 12.8. Our findings provide a theoretical basis for designing and optimizing the cooking tank.