Numerous gas–liquid–solid flows exist in chemical engineering and metallurgical processes. Numerical modeling is an important topic that can be used to improve the design and investigate the operating conditions of these processes. The complicated interphase interaction within such three-phase systems, which include free surfaces and discrete phases, poses challenges in the existing methods. We implemented a volume-of-fluid (VOF) and discrete-element-method (DEM) combined solver, which should be useful for modeling the gas–liquid–solid systems, within the OpenFOAM framework. The Du Plessis and Masliyah drag force, added mass force, and capillary force were considered for fluid–particle coupling. The VOF–DEM solver was tested in three different cases, namely, particles in pure gas, particle collision in water, and gas–liquid–solid three-phase dam break. The results were validated against previous experiments and good agreement was obtained between the simulations and the experiments, which indicates the accuracy and suitability of this VOF–DEM solver for gas–liquid–solid systems.

化学工程和冶金过程中存在大量的气-液-固流动。数值建模是一个重要的主题，可用于改进设计和研究这些过程的操作条件。这种包括自由表面和离散相的三相系统中复杂的相间相互作用给现有方法带来了挑战。我们实现了流体体积（VOF）和离散元素方法（DEM）组合求解器，这对于在OpenFOAM框架内对气-液-固系统建模非常有用。考虑了Du Plessis和Masliyah的拖曳力，附加质量力和毛细力，以进行流体-颗粒耦合。在三种不同情况下对VOF–DEM求解器进行了测试，即纯气体中的粒子，水中的粒子碰撞，气液固三相溃坝。该结果已通过先前的实验进行了验证，并且在仿真和实验之间取得了良好的一致性，这表明该VOF-DEM求解器在气-液-固系统中的准确性和适用性。