Chemicals Industry Computational Fluid Dynamics Roadmap Summary
An electronic copy of the roadmap can be downloaded (PDF 324 KB) Download Adobe Reader.
Background
A series of workshops were held to identify where computational fluid dynamics can be used to address challenges faced by the chemical process industry and to identify the research required to meet these challenges. The Council of Chemical Research (CCR) lead the effort with support provided from private companies, national laboratories, and the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Industrial Technologies (OIT). The Computational Fluid Dynamics Roadmap presents the priorities identified at the workshop.
Vision Linkage
Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) was identified as a critical R&D area in the Computational Technologies technical area in Vision 2020. It provides a quantitative description of flowing fluids (gases, liquids, solids) in chemical and other industrial processes. CFD can be used to predict the performance of an industrial process, and thus can be used as a tool for improving efficiency in existing systems and the design of new systems.
Goals
- Shorten lead times (from research to final plant design) to 3-5 years
- Reduce plant down times by 1%
- Reduce separation energy and improve separation efficiency by 20%
- Increase reliability of design
- Reduce/eliminate design errors
Priority R&D Needs
- Improved numerical methods (dilute to dense phases, data sets for code verification and scaling, adaptive computational grids)
- Phenomenology and constitutive relations (characterizing dilute to dense flow regimes, interactions between phases, reliable turbulence closures for multi-phase flows)
- Experimental validation of multi-phase flow models, small and large scale tests for model validation, new diagnostics and sensors for multi-phase flow experiments