Population Balance - Example Projects
 

Hi guys,

I seem to be having strange divergence issues when activating nucleation and growth phenomena with population balance modelling. I was wondering if anyone has example projects they would be able to send me, where these phenomena work? Just to see if i can narrow down where the problem is.

Regards

Hi MNolan,
I'm unable to give you a definitive answer about this as I haven't got practical experience with the PDF model. but I might be able to give you a few pointers.

Firstly nucleation & growth themselves can have aspects in common with stiff chemistry problems; it's a possibility that the problem itself is just a pain to solve. Have you tried using more conservative solver settings?

What about the ansys literature ? you should be able to get the "Ansys fluent Population Balance Module Manual" from Ansys if you don't already have it. They should also have a tutorial where it's implimented. Try looking for one called "tut-16-dqmom" titled "Tutorial: Modeling Liquid Reactions in CIJR Using the Eulerian PDF transport (DQMOM-IEM) model" as a starter

Thanks for your reply.

What do you mean by conservative solver settings? Furthermore, as for the tutorial, I have already followed the crystallisation tutorial in the guide line by line, however I am still getting the same divergence error

"conservative solver settings" generally means lower underrelaxation factors (but can mean other things aswell). Typically stiff chemistry can be solved by setting extremely low urfs, and slowly ramping them up, but historically stiff chemistry problems (assuming stiff chemistry is the problem) are prone to difficulties solving.

In the past I have had divergence problems due to errors in the way I've actually set up the phases & species for models. As I said I don't have experience with the population balance model so I can't really help, but my understanding is it's similar to a Euler-Euler model, with the separate 'bins' of sizes acting like separate Eulerian dispersed phases so It could be similar ?

Ansys also has an option called "stiff chemistry solver" (which has helped me in other work) but I'm not sure if this'll be available in the population balance model ?
it is accessed by going to models-species-reactions-volumetric(tickbox)-stiffchemistrysolver(tickbox).

Sorry to hear the tutorial isn't working, have you tried contacting ansys support ?

Hi again,

Thanks again for your reply. How you described my model is exactly the case. I'm not sure if it's to do with the phases or bins though, because the PB works fine until I turn on the nucleation and growth phenomena.

The tutorial I actually tried was a step by step guide to PB setup in the fluent user guide. The tutorial you quoted I can't actually find online. Do you by any chance have a URL?

Kind regards

You need to get access to Ansys' support service in order to get access to their tutorials etc.

They've changed the policy since I have last used it, but they have a "customer portal" and a "student portal" now - this will give you access to all of their tutorials.

You might also be able to phone or email the nearest branch and ask them to send through the specific tutorial, but long-term it's much better if you get access to the portal.