Numerical Methods to Simulate Turbulent Dispersed Flows in Complex Geometries

Population Balance is a prominent ingredient of modeling transport phenomena. Population Balance Equations (PBEs) are coupled to Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to simulate turbulent dispersed flows. One of the arising challenges is to obtain an appropriate discretization technique for the internal coordinate of PBEs, so the resulting equations can lead to acceptable solutions with affordable computational costs in reasonable time scales. On the other hand, geometries in the industrial problems can be very complex such that pre-processing steps require great effort and time, especially for pure hexahedral meshes. Nevertheless, instead of conventional meshing tools, a different approach based on the concept of “fictitious domains”, Fictitious Boundary Method (FBM), can be employed to mesh complex, moving and/or deforming geometries. In this study, we present efficient implementation strategies and numerical methods to couple PBEs to CFD and numerical simulation techniques using a finite element approach in combination with FBM. The presented methods are validated with a study of Sulzer static mixer, SMV [1], and simulations of rigid particulate flows [2], which were achieved in the FeatFlow environment.