AN EXTENDED MULTI-PHYSICS FRAMEWORK FOR MODELLING HETEROGENEOUS TRANSPORT AND REACTION KINETICS

Conjugate coupled physics problems with various degrees of heat, mass, and momentum transport between multiple materials and domains exist across industry. These can include automotive brake cooling; thermal cooling of electronics; and processing of chemical reactive species within packed bed reactors within the oil and gas industry [1]. With the ever-growing demand to produce more efficient, more environmentally friendly, durable, and cost effective products, engineers seek to leverage more complex simulation capabilities to construct realistic virtual prototypes to enable their design and decision making.

Within this discussion, an existing framework built on OpenFOAM Technology [2] is extended to model complex conjugate heat, mass, and momentum transport within a chemical reacting system is presented. The multi-physics framework is leveraged to simulate the behaviour within a gas-phase packed-bed reactor composed of randomly packed particles within a tube region. Information about interstitial flow phenomena; global and local pressure profiles; along with solid species transport phenomena is captured similar to what is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Typical surface pressure distribution (left) and interstitial velocity profiles of complex packed structure.

There are several challenges to performing a CFD analysis these types of systems, including the creation of randomly packed domains; meshing of these complex structures; and capturing the intricate transport phenomena between regions [2]. Attendees will be left with a deeper understanding of challenges associated with these types of multi-physics problems and how these can be overcome with the presented framework.

References

[1] D.P. Combest. Interstitial-Scale Modelling of Packed-Bed Reactors. PhD Dissertation. Energy, Environmental, and Chemical Engineering Dept. Washington University in St. Louis. 2012. Accessed January 29, 2020. [2] O. Oxtoby, E. Villiers, S. Georgescu. A new Region-Coupled Framework for Conjugate Heat Transfer. 2016 11th OpenFOAM Workshop, Guimarães, Portugal. Accessed January 29, 2020. [3] D. P. Combest, P. A. Ramachandran. Micro-Scale Modelling of Packed Beds. November 2010. 2010 AIChE Annual Conference. Accessed January 29, 2020.