Assessment of the effects of the temporal state in the numerical simulation of the airflow around a storage pile in the presence of a cubic bulding

Resumo

Diffuse emissions of granular material from storage piles open to the atmosphere represent an important source of pollution by industrial sites.  Thus, to better deal with its impacts, a good understanding of the airflow around piles at small scales is vital, for example, at the characteristic scale of an industrial site. In this sense, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) numerical simulations are largely applied. However, recent works have reported non-symmetric results for the airflow around the storage pile. This is not expected for this kind of geometrical case. The present work evaluates the influence, in terms of symmetry, of numerically simulating the airflow around the storage pile in a steady and unsteady state, using the open source software OpenFOAM-v2312. It was shown that the cubic building presence induces several instabilities in the airflow. Such instabilities cause convergence problems in the steady state solution and produce non-symmetric results. On the other hand, through an unsteady simulation, it was possible to capture the instabilities well and thus obtain averaged symmetric results. Second-order upwind methods were used.