2014, Anker, Felix, Ganesan, Sashikumaar, John, Volker, Schmeyer, Ellen

A direct discretization approach and an operator-splitting scheme are applied for the numerical simulation of a population balance system which models the synthesis of urea with a uni-variate population. The problem is formulated in axisymmetric form and the setup is chosen such that a steady state is reached. Both solvers are assessed with respect to the accuracy of the results, where experimental data are used for comparison, and the efficiency of the simulations. Depending on the goal of simulations, to track the evolution of the process accurately or to reach the steady state fast, recommendations for the choice of the solver are given.

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.

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.

2011, Bordás, Robert, John, Volker, Schmeyer, Ellen, Thévenin, Domnique

The interaction of a disperse droplet population (spray) in a turbulent flow field is studied by combining wind tunnel experiments with simulations based on the model of a population balance system. The behavior of the droplets is modeled numerically by a population balance equation. Velocities of the air and of the droplets are determined by non-intrusive measurements. A direct discretization of the 4D equation for the droplet size distribution is used in the simulations. Important components of the numerical algorithm are a variational multiscale method for turbulence modeling, an upwind scheme for the 4D equation and a pre-processing approach to evaluate the aggretation integrals. The simulations of this system accurately predict the modifications of the droplet size distribution from the inlet to the outlet of the measurement section. Since the employed configuration is simple and considering that all measurement data are freely available thanks to an Internet-based repository, the considered experiment is proposed as a benchmark problem for the simulation of disperse two-phase turbulent flows.