Effect of fluid elasticity on the numerical stability of high-resolution schemes for high shearing contraction flows using OpenFOAM

Viscoelastic fluids due to their non-linear nature play an important role in process and polymer industries. These non-linear characteristics of fluid, influence final outcome of the product. Such processes though look simple are numerically challenging to study, due to the loss of numerical stability. Over the years, various methodologies have been developed to overcome this numerical limitation. In spite of this, numerical solutions are considered distant from accuracy, as first-order upwind-differencing scheme （UDS） is often employed for improving the stability of algorithm. To elude this effect, some works been reported in the past, where high-resolution-schemes （HRS） were employed and Deborah number was varied. However, these works are limited to creeping flows and do not detail any information on the numerical stability of HRS. Hence, this article presents the numerical study of high shearing contraction flows, where stability of HRS are addressed in reference to fluid elasticity. Results suggest that all I-IRS show some order of undue oscillations in flow variable profiles, measured along vertical lines placed near contraction region in the upstream section of domain, at varied elasticity number E ~ 5. Furthermore, by E, a clear relationship between numerical stability of HRS and E was obtained, which states that the order of undue oscillations in flow variable profiles is directly proportional to E.

TRANSONIC FLOW CALCULATION OF EULER EQUATIONS BY IMPLICIT ITERATING SCHEME WITH FLUX SPLITTING

Three dimensional Euler equations are solved in the finite volume form with van Leer's flux vector splitting technique. Block matrix is inverted by Gauss-Seidel iteration in two dimensional plane while strongly implicit alternating sweeping is implemented in the direction of the third dimension. Very rapid convergence rate is obtained with CFL number reaching the order of 100. The memory resources can be greatly saved too. It is verified that the reflection boundary condition can not be used with flux vector splitting since it will produce too large numerical dissipation. The computed flow fields agree well with experimental results. Only one or two grid points are there within the shock transition zone.

Modeling and simulation of chemically reacting flows in gas-solid catalytic and non-catalytic processes

This paper gives an overview of the recent development of modeling and simulation of chemically react- ing flows in gas-solid catalytic and non-catalytic processes. General methodology has been focused on the Eulerian-Lagrangian description of particulate flows, where the particles behave as the catalysts or the reactant materials. For the strong interaction between the transport phenomena （i.e., momentum, heat and mass transfer） and the chemical reactions at the particle scale, a cross-scale modeling approach, i.e., CFD-DEM or CFD-DPM, is established for describing a wide variety of complex reacting flows in multiphase reactors, Representative processes, including fluid catalytic cracking （FCC）, catalytic conversion of syngas to methane, and coal pyrolysis to acetylene in thermal plasma, are chosen as case studies to demonstrate the unique advantages of the theoretical scheme based on the integrated particle-scale information with clear physical meanings, This type of modeling approach provides a solid basis for understanding the multiphase reacting flow problems in general.

All Hydrogen Refinery with Zero Residue Discharge

This article summarizes the block process flow scheme for the 8.0 Mt/a refining project at Hainan Refining and Chemical Company, Ltd., highlighting a green route for processing sour heavy oils, and the enlarged scale of production with Chinese content. The refinery is targeted at hydrotreating of process streams, integration and intensified design of process units, clean gasoline and diesel production, centralized recovery and utilization of light ends and optimization of sulphur recovery systems.

AN IMPROVED EFFICIENT SEMI-IMPLICIT FINITE ELEMENT SCHEME FOR TWO-DIMENSIONAL TIDAL FLOW COMPUTATIONS

In a recent paper, an efficient semi-implicit finite element scheme for 2-dimensional tidal flow computations is proposed. In that scheme, each term of the governing equations, rather than each dependent variable, is ex- panded in terms of the unknown nodal values. Simpson's rule ix used for numerical integration to make the mass matrix diagonal. The friction terms are represented semi-implicitly to improve stability, but no additional compu- tational effort is required. The shortcomings of this scheme are that the time-stepping scheme is only first-order ae- curate and artificial smoothing is required to control the numerical noise. In this paper, the previous scheme is im- proved by including the eddy viscosity terms in the governing equations to replace artificial smoothing in noise con- trol and the time-stepping scheme is modified to make it second-order accurate. These improvements can be achieved with only a slight increase in computational effort. The test cases used previously to validate the former scheme are again employed to test the present scheme.