I’m excited to announce the publication of work with my colleagues in a new paper, Fully resolved simulation of particulate flows with particles-fluid heat transfer, in the Journal of Computational Physics. This paper describes an extension of my previous work, adding the ability to account for heat transfer between particles and the surrounding fluid.
This is an especially important new capability because particle flows are so frequently used in industrial chemical processing applications where temperature must be closely controlled. Whether heat is being added to catalyze a chemical reaction or is a result of the chemical reaction itself, our new method is able to simulate this phenomenon accurately and efficiently.
Implemented to run on GPUs, our method can simulate thousands of particles, providing a new window though which we can work to improve our understanding of the behavior of particle flows. By learning more about particle flows, we can make existing chemical processing technologies faster, safer, and less expensive.
Abstract:
The Physalis method for the fully resolved simulation of particulate flows is extended to include heat transfer between the particles and the fluid. The particles are treated in the lumped capacitance approximation. The simulation of several steady and time-dependent situations for which exact solutions or exact balance relations are available illustrates the accuracy and reliability of the method. Some examples including natural convection in the Boussinesq approximation are also described.
Adam J. Sierakowski, Ph.D. 