Session: 01-07-02 Industrial Fluid Mechanics

Paper Number: 66025

Start Time: August 12th, 10:50 AM

66025 - Numerical Study on a Flow Field in the Rinsing Process of a Beverage Can Transported With a Constant Velocity 

In the production of canned beverage, a water is ejected into a can to wash away dusts and small plastic pieces on the can surface before beverage is filled to the can. Brewers and beverage factories are required to reduce the amount of water used for this rinsing process, but the water flow inside the can has not been studied yet. In particular, since the can is moving in the rinsing process, the flow field becomes highly unsteady and difficult to measure or visualize for this relative motion of the can and the jet, and the amount of water ejected into the can is very limited for rinsing the whole surface of the can. Thus, we numerically simulate the flow field inside the can in the rinsing process. In our simulation, a beverage can model was set upside down and rinsed with a water jet ejected from a nozzle below the can. The nozzle, instead of the can, was moved with a constant velocity in normal to the can central axis. Based on the actual rinsing process, whole the setup such as the can and nozzle were inclined at an angle with respect to the horizontal line, and the nozzle moves at the same inclination angle. We also consider the case with a stationary nozzle to see the effect of the relative motion. We controlled water ejection duration from the static nozzle so that the same water volume as the moving-nozzle case was ejected into the can. The result shows that, only a small amount of water flowed into the can because of the moving velocity of the nozzle. For the moving nozzle case, the water impinged the side and bottom of the can. Then, the water turned into a liquid film, then became ligament, and broke-up into fine droplets with complex motion. On the other hand, for a stationary can, a liquid film was formed almost symmetry with respect to the central axis of the can, and then it split into liquid ligaments. We visualized the area swept by water in the rinsing process using the time average of VOF. The result shows that, within the observation time, for the moving can, the water passes only about one-third from the bottom of the can, while for a static can, the swept area is widespread.

Presenting Author: Tatsuma Kawachi Seikei University

Authors:

Tatsuma Kawachi Seikei University
Takuto Sasaki Seikei University
Aya Kaneko Seikei University
Yu Nishio Seikei University
Takanobu Ogawa Seikei University