How to Benefit from CFD Simulation

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Siemens Industry Software GmbH Digital Factory Division

Finding the Sweet Spot

Next comes the preliminary reactor configuration followed by scale-up and simulation of a pilot scale design. Finding the sweet spot for the pilot scale design is typically the stiffest challenge during the design process, as the affected parameters are linked non-linearly to each other, and hence each of the sub process scales differently.

Therefore if you want a larger capacity, increasing the size geometrically is sufficient, but not so for reaction, heat transfer, or mixing. If you scale the model with turbulence scales, it may result in extremely high revolutions per minute or a geometrically unfeasible design.

As a result, there are many different designs that can be created depending on the scale-up rule used, and achieving the perfect scale-up model requires design space exploration to find the optimum result.

Final design is accomplished through extrapolation from scale-up rules, detailed flow modeling, assessment of safety risks and runaway reactions, and dynamic modeling of the entire system to see how the predicted reactions will work at plant scale. At each stage of the design process, CFD can provide predictive capability, design exploration and optimization at better fidelity, speed and cost than experimental data alone.

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