News of February 15, 2023
Vivid demonstration: A morphology-adaptive simulation model or the fascination of the interaction between air and water
Multiphase flows play an important role in many processes in chemical and process engineering as well as in power generation. Research teams are therefore trying to investigate their behavior and make it accurately predictable. The computational resources and simulation technology available today provide them with a powerful environment for this purpose. However, even the detailed simulation of processes that seem to be trivial at first glance, such as a jet of water hitting a filled water basin, quickly reveal the complexity of the task.
This supposedly simple example is prototypical for many situations of technical relevance, such as the filling of bottles or reactors in the chemical industry. Fluid dynamics play a very important role here, but are by no means easy to predict. In addition to the entrapment of large gas bubbles, their disintegration into smaller bubbles and the direct entrainment of disperse gas also play an important role.
The team of Dr. Fabian Schlegel from the Institute of Fluid Dynamics at HZDR has tackled this problem. The goal was to reliably predict such a plunging liquid jet and the resulting gas bubbles in a wide range of sizes by numerical simulation.
The video shows exemplarily the results of such a numerical simulation with the modeling approach named MultiMorph model implemented in OpenFOAM based on a plunging jet into a filled water basin. OpenFOAM (Open Source Field Operation and Manipulation) is an open-source numerical simulation software package developed to solve fluid mechanical problems. The MultiMorph model is a special morphology-adaptive multifield two-fluid model that is being developed at HZDR specifically for simulating technical applications and answering engineering questions. It is characterized by considering both, resolved and statistically modeled small interfaces, to increase the predictive power of numerical simulations while keeping the use of computing power reasonable.
The team is interested in more than just an aesthetic visualization of running water. The method is primarily being developed for large-scale technical processes, such as distillation. In chemical industry, it is a very common technical process, which, precisely because of its hunger for energy, is in dire need for optimization in terms of efficiency. Distillation columns are operated continuously and often consist of several trays through which gas is fed from below into a flowing liquid. One goal of the team is to simulate such processes with very different spatial resolutions.
A Morphology-adaptive Multifield Two-fluid Model
Additional information:
Dr. Fabian Schlegel
Institute of Fluid Dynamics at HZDR
Phone: +49 351 260 3467 | Email: f.schlegel@hzdr.de
Media contact:
Simon Schmitt | Head
Communications and Media Relations at HZDR
Phone: +49 351 260 3400 | Email: s.schmitt@hzdr.de
