Stirred tank reactor: need advice on the workflow to use
 

Hi all,

I am a beginner for OpenFOAM. My school project requires me to model fluid flow in a stirred tank reactor (a cylinder with impeller blades at the center to move liquid in rotation).

I am just hoping someone can give some advice to my workflow on this CFD project. Not seeking exact solution here, but just pondering if this is a feasible approach.

1. Use blender to make the cylinder surface, the impeller and rod holding the impeller.

2. Then export as stl. file, and then use snappyHexMesh (do it need Swiftsnap plugin for blender for this?) for meshing the CAD model.

3. Then in OpenFOAM, I can use moving reference frame approach (to simulate rotating blades) with RANS solver (for turbulent flow) to simulate the flow?

Thank you for your help!
Kevin

I work on very similar issues.

My workflow is to besh the entire tank with blockMesh to get a very good structured background grid. Then I mesh the impeller and the baffles with snappyHexMesh and using topology set respectively... (zero thickness baffles).

This gives very good results in general and is relatively easy to use. You can make your STL of the impeller using whatever you want, I use Salome personnaly.

If you modeled the fluid flow in the tank, how did you implement the rotating frame, as well as introducing the liquid into the tank?
I learned how to make the mesh for the reactor in Salome, but I'm stuck right now. Thanks.

Kevin