Hi. Everyone.

There are many transport problems including fluid flow ,heat transfer and chemical reactions in Chemical Engineering.

Can CFD solve these problems? Are there some successful examples? Which commercial codes is suit for the applications?

Thank you in advance.

Yes CFD can, and does handle this problem. CFD-ACE+ from CFD Research Corporatioin (www.cfdrc.com) is a commercially available CFD Package that is being extensively used for these kinds of applications with an excellent proven track record on performance and accuracy. Please visit the web site (www.cfdrc.com) to get more information.

Take a look at www.aeat.com/cfx

Dear H Chen

CFD is used in many cases with chemical reactions, but often the chemistry and other processes involved are too complex to allow a CFD simulation to be done accurately and efficiently. Don't belive everything the commercial code vendors say. They will naturally try to sell you their codes. Describe your problem here instead and you'll get a more objective answer I think.

- Pat

I think you are right about the difficulties involved in modeling the chemical reacting flows. Combustor flow modeling is one of the effort at the Imperial College in 70's. So, the CFD applications in chemical reacting flow has been around for over 20 years. Late last year, I had an opportunity to use an in-house 3-D combustor code to design a brand new low pollution turbine engine combustor. After 3 months and several hundreds of hours later, the best we can do was to come up with a candidate configuration based on the trend derived from around 32 different configurations. ( you get completely different answers by changing just a couple of parameters in the chemistry models. ) Testing is still the only practical way to design the combustor. The CFD approach maybe able to show you some trend in varying the configuration,such as geometry and flow rates. 3-D reacting flow computation is still very ,very slow.

Just FYI, Chemical Engineering magazine and McGraw-Hill are sponsoring a two-day course in New York City on November 19 and 20, called "CFD for the Chemical Engineer." The fully accredited course will outline how to use CFD in various applications, and will feature individualized "hands on" computer sessions using CFX and other software to address key problems. Teaching the class will be Simon Lo, Harbi Pordal, and Brad Hutchison from AEA Technologies Advanced Scientific Computing. Course credits are issued by the New Jersey Institute of Technology. For more information, please see the Chemical Engineering website, www.che.com, or contact me at ashanley@che.com. Best, Agnes Shanley, Chemical Engineering magazine, ashanley@che.com, tel212-904-3411