A water model and numerical study of the spout height in a gas-stirred vessel

The height and width of spouts in a water model of a gas-stirred ladle were measured photographically. The shapes were found to be Gaussian, and correlations were developed for the height and width. To mathematically model the free surface effects, a novel combined staggered-grid and volume-of-fluid computational code was developed. It was tested successfully against an established code in the “broken dam” validation test. The new free surface code was added to an existing code for a gasstirred plume to model the entire vessel. It was found that the code under-predicted the actual spout height. The model handled the momentum of the plume accurately, but did not account for the phenomena associated with the bubbles breaking the surface. The importance of these inter-related phenomena had not been appreciated previously.