Multi Phase and Macro Particle
 

Hello everyone,

I am new to this forum and CFD, which I find fascinating!
I started to learn FLUENT on my own, by reading the official material, tutorials and a bit of FLUENT Theory Guide.

One of the most interesting flows I encountered is the multi phase, but I hardly can find some "solid" material which can provide good examlples of the various regimes. Also searched the forum lots of times and read lots of posts but nothing constructive found.

Now, I am trying to simulate a flow in a pipe of a very small diameter, let's say that the outlet of the pipe is dripping tiny drops and not running like a tap or something of its scale. The water in the flowing "mixture" contains particles of sand in very low concentration, about 1 particle per million.

The purpose of the simulation is to understand the affects and effects of the sand particles on the nominal flow rate of the water, through aggregation and physically stucking in various sections of the pipe (the inner pipe section geometry may variate).

As much as I understand, I cannot use the DPM Model, because I am interested in particles to be represented as non-point-of-mass and the effect of their interactions with themselves and the water taken into account, it is clear to me (maybe misleadingly) that I need to use the Mixture or one of the Eulerian models (Because of the Stokes number involved and the particulate loading).

1) Am I making any sense by now?
2) Has anyone delt with a similar simulation and can drop me some info?
3) I have heard somewhere about MPM - Macro Particle Module for Fluent which deals with the sort of situations that I described, but I cannot find any official info about this module... Is it just a MYTH? or is it implemented in FLUENT through one of the models?

I will appreciate any help/idea/experience/material.
Cheers.