Use CFD-DEM to avoid the chipless cookie
There are lots of well-established CFD codes that can handle basic, single-phase flow. For my non-nerd friends, I'm talking about simulating the flow of "just water" or "just air"... a single fluid at a time. And, there are plenty of applications where that is useful.
What if you are primarily interested in the homogeneity of a mixing process, though? Think about mixing chunks of chocolate into the cookie batter at an industrial level. It's pretty damn important that little Johnny doesn't bite into a chip-less cookie, right?
Until recently, that's been a tall order in the simulation world. It has traditionally been done by duct-taping a DEM (Discrete Element Modeling) code to a CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) code in a complicated and fragile co-simulation.
STAR-CCM+ offers a fully coupled approach to this-- out of the box, in a single package. A fully coupled "single code" approach opens this kind of simulation to a much wider audience.
If you'll happen to be at the AIChE Annual Meeting in the bay area next week, you can see it in action for yourself: Register for the CFD & DEM workshop here.
For the super techy, here are related abstracts for more talks on the subject:
- DEM Simulation of the Mixture of Dry and Wet Particles inside Rotary Mixer
- A Fully Coupled CFD-DEM Algorithm for S-L Mixing in Stirred Vessel
- Numerical Simulations of Fluidized Beds in Fine-Grid Geometries Using Source Smoothing with Cell Clustering Method for DEM-CFD Coupling
Photo by: Sarah Laval