Steady natural convection flow of a particulate suspension through a circular pipe

A continuum model for two-phase (fluid/particle) flow induced by natural convection is developed and applied to the problem of steady natural convention flow of a particulate suspension through an infinitely long pipe. The wall of the pipe is maintained at a constant temperature. The particle phase is endowed by an artificial viscosity which may be used to model particle-particle interaction in dension suspensions. Boundary conditions borrowed from rarefied gas dynamics are employed for the particle-phase wall conditions. Closed-form solutions for the velocity and temperature profiles are obtained. For the assumptions employed in the problem, the temperatures of both phases in the pipe are predicted to be uniform. A parametric study of some physical parameters involved in the problem is performed to illustrate the influence of these parameters on the velocity profiles of both the fluid and particle phases.