Three-dimensional Modeling of a Packed-bed Membrane Reactor

Three-dimensional Modeling of a Packed-bed Membrane Reactor 5.4.1 

Introduction to the Laige-scale Simulation Methods in Fluid Mechanics and Mass Transport 

In the last decade, we have found a rapid development of the method known as the lattice Boltzmann equation (LBE) method. Because of its physical soundness and outstanding amenability to parallel processing, the LBE method has been successfully applied for the simulation of a variety of flow- and mass-transport situations, including flows through porous media, turbulence, advective diffusion, multiphase and reactive flows, to name but a few. In particular, an effective numerical approach to simulate advective-diffusion transport (the moment- 

For the simulations presented in this chapter, a D3Q19 lattice (where D and Q denote the dimension of the lattice and the number of links per lattice node, respectively) was employed that is obtained as 3D projection of a 4D face-centered hypercubic lattice. 

As a model system a cylindrical reactor of the length L = 60 mm and inner diameter di = 7 mm packed with 400 uniform, nonporous spherical particles of the diameter dp = 1.8 mm was studied. The geometrical dimensions, as well as the average porosity, e = 0.47, of the packed bed were adjusted to those used in Section 5.2. Spatial discretization with the resolution of 30 lattice constant per sphere diameter was performed resulting in the computational domain of dimension 1300 X 117 X 117 points. The selected results given below intend to illustrate substantial differences and characteristics in the fluid dynamics in a FBR (Frs/Fss = 00) and PBMR. All the simulations presented were carried out on a Hewlett Packard Superdome parallel computer (64 processors, 120GB RAM). Typical simulation times for the complete model were about 24h on this architecture. 

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