Purpose/Aim
Granular/Particulate flows with charged particles under Alternating Current(AC) or Direct Current(AC) electric field exist in Gas Insulated Switchgear(GIS), which cause the damage of insulation even tripping operation. The motions of these particles are affected by the electrical field, ambient flow and collisions. The purpose of this paper is to study the charged particulate flows in GIS.
Experimental/Modeling methods
Based upon the improved coupled CFD-DEM framework under electric field, which not only computes the coupling of flow field, electric field with particle motion and particle charge, the particle-occupied solid fractions on CFD cell, particle-particle interactions and particle-wall interactions, but also considers the dielectrophoretic force, particle-particle Coulomb force, virtual mass force and Magnus force. The direct numerical simulation of charged particulate flows with Lagrangian particles in GIS have been carried out.
Results/discussion
The model is validated with theoretic solutions and experiments, and is applied to GIS. With the cases constructed by the CFD-DEM framework, some interesting rules for single particle’s flow have been further discussed, e.g., the relationship between particles' velocity and charge with voltage and its material properties. Some statistic information from the particulate flow in GIS, e.g., time-averaged electric field and flow field or distribution of particles' velocity and charge are analyzed as well.
Conclusions
The direct numerical simulation of the micro plasma feasible, the flows, collisions and the adsorption between positive/negative ions and electrons can be described with Lagrangian particles, by further reducing the size of particle and refresh the neighbor list in each time step of DEM.

GIS,Charged particulate flows,Finite volume method,Numerical simulation