2012, Bordás, Robert, John, Volker, Schmeyer, Ellen, Thévenin, Dominique

A droplet size distribution in a turbulent flow field is considered and modeled by means of a population balance system. This paper studies different numerical methods for the 4D population balance equation and their impact on an output of interest, the time-space-averaged droplet size distribution at the outlet which is known from experiments. These methods include different interpolations of the experimental data at the inlet, various discretizations in time and space, and different schemes for computing the aggregation integrals. It will be shown that notable changes in the output of interest might occur. In addition, the efficiency of the studied methods is discussed.

2014, Schmeyer, Ellen, Bordás, Róbert, Thévenin, Dominique, John, Volker

A turbulent vortex street in an air flow interacting with a disperse droplet population is investigated in a wind tunnel. Non-intrusive measurement techniques are used to obtain data for the air velocity and the droplet velocity. The process is modeled with a population balance system consisting of the incompressible NavierStokes equations and a population balance equation for the droplet size distribution. Numerical simulations are performed that rely on a variational multiscale method for turbulent flows, a direct discretization of the differential operator of the population balance equation, and a modern technique for the evaluation of the coalescence integrals. After having calibrated two unknown model parameters, a very good agreement of the experimental and numerical results can be observed.