Coupling the fictitious domain and sharp interface methods for the simulation of convective mass transfer around reactive particles: Towards a reactive Sherwood number correlation for dilute systems

Mostafa Sulaiman (1) , Abdelkader Hammouti (1) , Éric Climent (2) , Anthony Wachs (3)

1 IFPEN - IFP Energies nouvelles
2 IMFT - Institut de mécanique des fluides de Toulouse
3 UBC Mathematics - Department of Mathematics [Vancouver]

We suggest a reactive Sherwood number model for convective mass transfer around reactive particles in a dilute regime. The model is constructed with a simple external-internal coupling and is validated with Particle-Resolved Simulation (PRS). The PRS of reactive particle-fluid systems requires numerical methods able to handle efficiently sharp gradients of concentration and potential discontinuities of gradient concentrations at the fluid-particle interface. To simulate mass transfer from reactive catalyst beads immersed in a fluid flow, we coupled the Sharp Interface Method (SIM) to a Distributed Lagrange Multiplier/Fictious Domain (DLM/FD) two-phase flow solver. The accuracy of the numerical method is evaluated by comparison to analytic solutions and to generic test cases fully resolved by boundary fitted simulations. A previous theoretical model that couples the internal diffusion-reaction problem with the external advection-diffusion mass transfer in the fluid phase is extended to the configuration of three aligned spherical particles representative of a dilute particle-laden flow. Predictions of surface concentration, mass transfer coefficient and chemical effectiveness factor of catalyst particles are validated by DLM-FD/SIM simulations. It is shown that *

Keywords: Sharp Interface Method; Catalyst particle; Mass transfer; Sherwood number; Chemical reaction; Thiele modulus

Domains: Engineering Sciences [physics]; Mathematics [math]

Mostafa Sulaiman, Abdelkader Hammouti, Éric Climent, Anthony Wachs. Coupling the fictitious domain and sharp interface methods for the simulation of convective mass transfer around reactive particles: Towards a reactive Sherwood number correlation for dilute systems. Chemical Engineering Science, 2019, 198, pp.334-351. ⟨10.1016/j.ces.2019.01.004⟩. ⟨hal-02071673⟩