Abstract
Mine bulk-air-coolers are essential for climate control in deep underground mines. However, their design is yet to be fully understood due to complex interaction between the involved fluids. Thus far, mining industry used conventional, semi-empirical design techniques for such applications. However, these techniques are implicit by nature and does not investigate detailed physics of the chamber (i.e., droplet physics, heat transfer between fluids, phase change, turbulence etc.). Although these earlier models are successful in capturing inlet and outlet conditions sufficiently, they are limited to empirical observations made decades ago. Present study investigates the chamber physics numerically, with a coupled Eulerian-Lagrangian, multiphase, computational fluid dynamics model by aiming to reach similar design inlet and outlet conditions offered by the conventional methods. Results have shown that the developed numerical model has successfully correlated with the conventional design within 5% error and provided a deeper understanding regarding chamber physics by offering a significant parametric control. This parametric importance is also demonstrated by showing the droplet size impact on the final outlet conditions.