Numerical Research of Multi-Scale Coupling Simulation on Rotary Pressure Exchanger and Pipe System

Rotary Pressure exchanger (RPE) is an efficient device which recovers pressure energy from liquid streams in process industries. In this work, a multi-scale numerical investigation of pressure propagation in RPE and the pipeline is carried out. A system model including pipe system and RPE component is firstly presented, and is then solved by the integration of 1-D Method of characteristics (MOC) and CFD method. The simultaneous data exchange between the pipeline and RPE is enabled by making use of the existing programming interfaces. At last, the mutual effect of wave phenomenon in pipeline and RPE is evaluated by the synchronous interaction under transient operating conditions. The proposed multi-scale coupling approach in this work could either provide the internal flow details in RPE device or the dynamic behavior of the system, making the numerical simulation more reasonable with system-level accuracy and time-saving.