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Author: Wilbrandt, Ulrich ×

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    Optimal control of buoyancy-driven liquid steel stirring modeled with single-phase Navier–Stokes equations
    (Berlin ; Heidelberg : Springer, 2021) Wilbrandt, Ulrich; Alia, Najib; John, Volker
    Gas stirring is an important process used in secondary metallurgy. It allows to homogenize the temperature and the chemical composition of the liquid steel and to remove inclusions which can be detrimental for the end-product quality. In this process, argon gas is injected from two nozzles at the bottom of the vessel and rises by buoyancy through the liquid steel thereby causing stirring, i.e., a mixing of the bath. The gas flow rates and the positions of the nozzles are two important control parameters in practice. A continuous optimization approach is pursued to find optimal values for these control variables. The effect of the gas appears as a volume force in the single-phase incompressible Navier–Stokes equations. Turbulence is modeled with the Smagorinsky Large Eddy Simulation (LES) model. An objective functional based on the vorticity is used to describe the mixing in the liquid bath. Optimized configurations are compared with a default one whose design is based on a setup from industrial practice.
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    Modeling, simulation, and optimization of geothermal energy production from hot sedimentary aquifers
    (New York, NY [u.a.] : Springer Science + Business Media B.V., 2020) Blank, Laura; Rioseco, Ernesto Meneses; Caiazzo, Alfonso; Wilbrandt, Ulrich
    Geothermal district heating development has been gaining momentum in Europe with numerous deep geothermal installations and projects currently under development. With the increasing density of geothermal wells, questions related to the optimal and sustainable reservoir exploitation become more and more important. A quantitative understanding of the complex thermo-hydraulic interaction between tightly deployed geothermal wells in heterogeneous temperature and permeability fields is key for a maximum sustainable use of geothermal resources. Motivated by the geological settings of the Upper Jurassic aquifer in the Greater Munich region, we develop a computational model based on finite element analysis and gradient-free optimization to simulate groundwater flow and heat transport in hot sedimentary aquifers, and numerically investigate the optimal positioning and spacing of multi-well systems. Based on our numerical simulations, net energy production from deep geothermal reservoirs in sedimentary basins by smart geothermal multi-well arrangements provides significant amounts of energy to meet heat demand in highly urbanized regions. Our results show that taking into account heterogeneous permeability structures and a variable reservoir temperature may drastically affect the results in the optimal configuration. We demonstrate that the proposed numerical framework is able to efficiently handle generic geometrical and geological configurations, and can be thus flexibly used in the context of multi-variable optimization problems. Hence, this numerical framework can be used to assess the extractable geothermal energy from heterogeneous deep geothermal reservoirs by the optimized deployment of smart multi-well systems. © 2020, The Author(s).
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    On the feasibility of using open source solvers for the simulation of a turbulent air flow in a dairy barn
    (Amsterdam [u.a.] : Elsevier, 2020) Janke, David; Caiazzo, Alfonso; Ahmed, Naveed; Alia, Najib; Knoth, Oswald; Moreau, Baptiste; Wilbrandt, Ulrich; Willink, Dilya; Amon, Thomas; John, Volker
    Two transient open source solvers, OpenFOAM and ParMooN, and the commercial solver Ansys Fluent are assessed with respect to the simulation of the turbulent air flow inside and around a dairy barn. For this purpose, data were obtained in an experimental campaign at a 1:100 scaled wind tunnel model. All solvers used different meshes, discretization schemes, and turbulence models. The experimental data and numerical results agree well for time-averaged stream-wise and vertical-wise velocities. In particular, the air exchange was predicted with high accuracy by both open source solvers with relative differences less than 4% and by the commercial solver with a relative difference of 9% compared to the experimental results. With respect to the turbulent quantities, good agreements at the second (downwind) half of the barn inside and especially outside the barn could be achieved, where all codes accurately predicted the flow separation and, in many cases, the root-mean-square velocities. Deviations between simulations and experimental results regarding turbulent quantities could be observed in the first part of the barn. These deviations can be attributed to the utilization of roughness elements between inlet and barn in the experiment that were not modeled in the numerical simulations. Both open source solvers proved to be promising tools for the accurate prediction of time-dependent phenomena in an agricultural context, e.g., like the transport of particulate matter or pathogen-laden aerosols in and around agricultural buildings. © 2020 The Authors
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    Finite element pressure stabilizations for incompressible flow problems
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 2019) John, Volker; Knobloch, Petr; Wilbrandt, Ulrich
    Discretizations of incompressible flow problems with pairs of finite element spaces that do not satisfy a discrete inf-sup condition require a so-called pressure stabilization. This paper gives an overview and systematic assessment of stabilized methods, including the respective error analysis.
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    ParMooN - a modernized program package based on mapped finite elements
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 2016) Wilbrandt, Ulrich; Bartsch, Clemens; Ahmed, Naveed; Alia, Najib; Anker, Felix; Blank, Laura; Caiazzo, Alfonso; Ganesa, Sashikumaar; Giere, Swetlana; Matthies, Gunar; Meesala, Raviteja; Shamim, Abdus; Venkatesan, Jagannath; John, Volker
    PARMOON is a program package for the numerical solution of elliptic and parabolic partial differential equations. It inherits the distinct features of its predecessor MOONMD [28]: strict decoupling of geometry and finite element spaces, implementation of mapped finite elements as their definition can be found in textbooks, and a geometric multigrid preconditioner with the option to use different finite element spaces on different levels of the multigrid hierarchy. After having presented some thoughts about in-house research codes, this paper focuses on aspects of the parallelization, which is the main novelty of PARMOON. Numerical studies, performed on compute servers, assess the efficiency of the parallelized geometric multigrid preconditioner in comparison with parallel solvers that are available in external libraries. The results of these studies give a first indication whether the cumbersome implementation of the parallelized geometric multigrid method was worthwhile or not.
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    Reconstruction of flow domain boundaries from velocity data via multi-step optimization of distributed resistance
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 2022) Pártl, Ondřej; Wilbrandt, Ulrich; Mura, Joaquín; Caiazzo, Alfonso
    We reconstruct the unknown shape of a flow domain using partially available internal velocity measurements. This inverse problem is motivated by applications in cardiovascular imaging where motion-sensitive protocols, such as phase-contrast MRI, can be used to recover three-dimensional velocity fields inside blood vessels. In this context, the information about the domain shape serves to quantify the severity of pathological conditions, such as vessel obstructions. We consider a flow modeled by a linear Brinkman problem with a fictitious resistance accounting for the presence of additional boundaries. To reconstruct these boundaries, we employ a multi-step gradient-based variational method to compute a resistance that minimizes the difference between the computed flow velocity and the available data. Afterward, we apply different post-processing steps to reconstruct the shape of the internal boundaries. To limit the overall computational cost, we use a stabilized equal-order finite element method. We prove the stability and the well-posedness of the considered optimization problem. We validate our method on three-dimensional examples based on synthetic velocity data and using realistic geometries obtained from cardiovascular imaging.
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    Optimal control of a buoyancy-driven liquid steel stirring modeled with single-phase Navier--Stokes equations
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 2020) Wilbrandt, Ulrich; Alia, Najib; John, Volker
    Gas stirring is an important process used in secondary metallurgy. It allows to homogenize the temperature and the chemical composition of the liquid steel and to remove inclusions which can be detrimental for the end-product quality. In this process, argon gas is injected from two nozzles at the bottom of the vessel and rises by buoyancy through the liquid steel thereby causing stirring, i.e., a mixing of the bath. The gas flow rates and the positions of the nozzles are two important control parameters in practice. A continuous optimization approach is pursued to find optimal values for these control variables. The effect of the gas appears as a volume force in the single-phase incompressible NavierStokes equations. Turbulence is modeled with the Smagorinsky Large Eddy Simulation (LES) model. An objective functional based on the vorticity is used to describe the mixing in the liquid bath. Optimized configurations are compared with a default one whose design is based on a setup from industrial practice.
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    On the feasibility of using open source solvers for the simulation of a turbulent air flow in a dairy barn
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 2019) Janke, David; Caiazzo, Alfonso; Ahmed, Naveed; Alia, Najib; Knoth, Oswald; Moreau, Baptiste; Wilbrandt, Ulrich; Willink, Dilya; Amon, Thomas; John, Volker
    Two transient open source solvers, OpenFOAM and ParMooN, are assessed with respect to the simulation of the turbulent air flow inside and around a dairy barn. For this purpose, data were obtained in an experimental campaign at a 1:100 scaled wind tunnel model. Both solvers used different meshes, discretization schemes, and turbulence models. The experimental data and numerical results agree well for time-averaged stream-wise and vertical-wise velocities. In particular, the air exchange was predicted with high accuracy by both solvers with relative errors less than 5 % compared to the experimental results. With respect to the turbulent quantities, good agreements at the second (downwind) half of the barn inside and especially outside the barn could be achieved, where both codes accurately predicted the flow separation and the root-mean-square velocities. Deviations between simulations and experimental results regarding turbulent quantities could be observed in the first part of the barn, due to different inlet conditions between the experimental setup and the numerical simulations. Both solvers proved to be promising tools for the accurate prediction of time-dependent phenomena in an agricultural context, e.g., like the transport of particulate matter or pathogen-laden aerosols in and around agricultural buildings.
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    Modeling, simulation, and optimization of geothermal energy production from hot sedimentary aquifers
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 2019) Blank, Laura; Meneses Rioseco, Ernesto; Wilbrandt, Ulrich; Caiazzo, Alfonso
    Geothermal district heating development has been gaining momentum in Europe with numerous deep geothermal installations and projects currently under development. With the increasing density of geothermal wells, questions related to the optimal and sustainable reservoir exploitation become more and more important. A quantitative understanding of the complex thermo-hydraulic interaction between tightly deployed geothermal wells in heterogeneous temperature and permeability fields is key for a maximum sustainable use of geothermal resources. Motivated by the geological settings of the Upper Jurassic aquifer in the Greater Munich region, we develop a computational model based on finite element analysis and gradient-free optimization to simulate groundwater flow and heat transport in hot sedimentary aquifers, and investigate numerically the optimal positioning and spacing of multi-well systems. Based on our numerical simulations, net energy production from deep geothermal reservoirs in sedimentary basins by smart geothermal multi-well arrangements provides significant amounts of energy to meet heat demand in highly urbanized regions. Our results show that taking into account heterogeneous permeability structures and variable reservoir temperature may drastically affect the results in the optimal configuration. We demonstrate that the proposed numerical framework is able to efficiently handle generic geometrical and geologocal configurations, and can be thus flexibly used in the context of multi-variable optimization problems. Hence, this numerical framework can be used to assess the extractable geothermal energy from heterogeneous deep geothermal reservoirs by the optimized deployment of smart multi-well systems.
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    On iterative subdomain methods for the Stokes-Darcy problem
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 2013) Caiazzo, Alfonso; John, Volker; Wilbrandt, Ulrich
    Iterative subdomain methods for the StokesDarcy problem that use Robin boundary conditions on the interface are reviewed. Their common underlying structure and their main differences are identified. In particular, it is clarified that there are different updating strategies for the interface conditions. For small values of fluid viscosity and hydraulic permeability, which are relevant in applications from geosciences, it is shown in numerical studies that only one of these updating strategies leads to an efficient numerical method, if this strategy is used in combination with appropriate parameters in the Robin boundary conditions. In particular, it is observed that the values of appropriate parameters are larger than those proposed so far. Not only the size but also the ratio of appropriate Robin parameters depends on the coefficients of the problem.