Numerical Simulation of Direct-Current Sand Leakage Wind Tunnel Based on FLUENT

Currently wind-sand tunnels are mainly used for research, protection and management of wind-sand landscape and wind-sand environment, and rarely adopted in structural wind engineering because the stable sections with adjustable wind speeds and wind-sand concentrations at a certain height are difficult to achieve. In order to study the distribution of wind-sand two-phase flow field in the direct-current sand leakage wind tunnel, in this work a wind tunnel model was built using the commercial software FLUENT, and then verified by simulating the existing sand leakage wind tunnel test. Based on the influence of wind speed, sand leakage volume fraction, sand leakage speed, and other parameters on wind-sand flow in the wind tunnel, a new type of sand leakage device for horizontal multi-port wind tunnel was further proposed. Simulation results of the wind-sand tunnel show that the distribution height of sand particles in the same location is higher at a larger wind speed. The quality of the sand particles entering the wind tunnel in unit time is mainly affected by volume fraction and velocity of the sand particles, and is directly proportional to the peak value of the sand particle concentration in the test location. Besides, a test section of about 1/2 wind tunnel height with uniform sand concentration has been realized in the wind-sand tunnel. The required test wind speed field and corresponding sand concentration can be achieved by adjusting the sand leakage volume fraction, sand leakage speed, and test position to complete the wind-sand quantitative tests for wind engineering well.