Principal Investigator: Associate Professor Kim Sørensen
Faculty of Engineering – Department of Energy Technology – AAU
We research the adhesive nature of small micron-sized particles in a turbulent flow. Due to the small size of the particles, inter-molecular forces such as van der Waals attraction becomes important. Due to the complex interaction between the adhesive particles and a turbulent flow, experimental studies are almost impossible to control to a satisfactory degree.
In our work, we therefore rely on numerical simulations using Large Eddy Simulations (LES) to the Discrete Element Method (DEM) to simulate how a high number of particles agglomerate in a turbulent flow. As particles collide over time intervals much smaller than the overall agglomeration process, these simulations tend to be computational expensive. Based on preliminary results published in Powder Technology , we have used ABACUS 2.0 to parametrically investigate how particle and fluid properties affect particle agglomeration.
As the computational time scales almost linearly with number of cores for our simulations, we have been able to run simulations that would not have been possible without ABACUS 2.0.
