A mild gasification method has been developed to provide an innovative clean coal technology. The objectives of this study are to (a) incorporate a fixed rate devolatilization model into the existing 2D multiphase reaction model, (b) expand the 2D model to 3D and (c) utilize the improved model to investigate the mild-gasification process and guide modification of the mild-gasifier design. The Eulerain-Eulerian method is employed to calculate both the primary phase (air) and secondary phase (coal particles). The improved 3D simulation model, incorporated with a devolatilization model, has been successfully developed and employed to determine the appropriate draft tube dimensions, entrained flow residence time, The simulations also help determine the appropriate operating fluidization velocity range to sustain the fluidized bed depth without depleting the chars or blowing the char away. The results are informative, but require future experimental data for verification.

No description available.

No description available.

En el siglo pasado se ha desarrollado una nueva energía: la nuclear. Su aplicación comprende tanto el campo militar como el campo civil. Unos de los aspectos más interesantes es el uso de esta energía para la producción de electricidad de uso civil. El combustible nuclear es de larga duración: unas barras de uranio pueden llegar a producir energía eléctrica durante una década aproximadamente. Sin embargo, a mediados del siglo pasado se planteó el problema de los residuos nucleares. Este problema es muy complejo por que, aunque la duración del combustible sea de una década, el periodo de decaimiento es del orden de siglos. Esta tesis quiere aportar su granito de arena a esta nueva rama de la ciencia nuclear, estudiando algunos aspectos del comportamiento geotécnico de los agregados de sal, para su uso como material de relleno en los depósitos definitivos de los residuos nucleares de mayor peligrosidad.La regla fundamental de diseño de dichos depósitos es que su función debe desarrollarse sin la ayuda del hombre o de máquinas y que la misma naturaleza tiene que ser quien proteja al hombre del riesgo de radiaciones durante el transcurso de los siglos. Parece que al día de hoy la solución mundialmente aceptada es la de un depósito profundo en formaciones rocosas, a veces utilizando antiguas minas, incluso de sal. Se prevé que entre esta década y la próxima entrarán en funcionamiento varios de estos depósitos en los países en que la investigación en este área está más avanzada.En Europa se está haciendo un esfuerzo común, bajo supervisión de la Unión Europea y por medio de proyectos de investigación, para estudiar el funcionamiento del almacenamiento y la difusión de los resultados de esos estudios entre los miembros de la Unión Europea, a fin de dar el mayor provecho a las diferentes investigaciones que en la actualidad se están desarrollando en todos los centros de investigación de Europa.Esta tesis trata sobre el comportamiento termo hidráulico de los agregados de sal debido a las altas temperaturas que el decaimiento de los residuos nucleares produce. Este fenómeno crea unos efectos en los materiales de relleno y en la formación de base de alrededor del deposito.La tesis tiene un desarrollo básicamente experimental. En el laboratorio se realizaron fundamentalmente dos ensayos; el primero permitió determinar la curva de retención de los agregados de sal altamente compactados. Para ello se utilizó la técnica de traslación de ejes para aplicar la succión matricial y se construyó una placa de succión apta a los materiales salinos para la realización de estos ensayos.Este ensayo permitió determinar el comportamiento de una propiedad básica de los materiales salinos no saturados, sus resultados pudieron aplicarse al resto de los trabajos que se realizaron con posterioridad en esta tesis.El objeto del segundo ensayo de laboratorio fue reproducir los fenómenos de variación de porosidad debidos a la presencia de una diferencia de temperatura en las extremidades de la muestra. Dicho ensayo tiene una importancia fundamental para los almacenamientos profundos, porque los residuos radiactivos serán una fuente de calor durante varios siglos y la presencia de elevadas temperaturas induce fenómenos de flujo y transporte en el contacto con los contenedores de carburante nuclear agotado. Además, en el caso de los agregados de sal, a estos fenómenos cabe añadir el intercambio de sal entre la fase sólida y la líquida (precipitación /disolución).Para desarrollar estas pruebas de laboratorio, se dedicó una parte importante de la investigación al desarrollo y comprobación del equipo de ensayo, siendo éste poco convencional y completamente novedoso. Este último ensayo, en su segunda fase, fue convalidado mediante un modelo numérico (CODE BRIGHT). Los resultados del modelo numérico han permitido confirmar todo cuanto se determinó en la fase experimental y la importancia de la succión matricial en estos fenómenos.

No description available.

Nach einer kurzen technischen Beschreibung der Mehrzweck-Thermohydraulikversuchsanlage TOPFLOW und der verwendeten Messtechnik werden die theoretischen Grundlagen zur Modellierung der Kondensation von Dampf in einer Wasserströmung erläutert. Dabei gehen die Autoren besonders auf die Auswahl geeigneter Modelle zur Beschreibung des Wärmeübergangs und der Zwischenphasengrenzfläche im Druckbereich zwischen 10 und 65 bar detailliert ein. Außerdem werden verschiedene Drift-Flux-Modelle auf ihre Tauglichkeit anhand von experimentellen Daten geprüft. Da Veränderungen thermodynamischer und strömungstechnischer Parameter hauptsächlich in axialer Richtung stattfinden, wurden diese Modelle in einen eindimensionalen Code eingebettet, mit dem der Strömungsverlauf entlang einer vertikalen Rohrleitung mit einer Länge von 8 m und einem Nenndurchmesser von 200 mm berechnet werden kann. Anschließend werden Aufbau und Funktion dieses Programms vorgestellt. Nachfolgend vergleichen die Autoren experimentelle und berechnete Strömungsverläufe bei der Kondensation von Dampf sowohl in einer unterkühlten Wasserströmung als auch nahe der Siedetemperatur. Dabei wird der Einfluss wichtiger Randbedingungen, wie z.B. Druck oder Primärblasengröße, auf die Kondensationsintensität analysiert. Eine Einschätzung der Fehlerbanden für die experimentellen Daten, die verwendeten Gittersensoren und die numerische Simulation schließen den Bericht ab.

Transient multi-phase flow problems in porous media are ubiquitous in engineering and environmental systems and processes; examples include heat exchangers, reservoir simulation, environmental remediation, magma flow in the earth crust and water management in porous electrodes of PEM fuel cells. This thesis focuses on the development of accurate and computationally efficient numerical models to simulate such flows. The research challenges addressed in this work fall in two areas. For a numerical standpoint, conventional numerical methods including Newton-Raphson linearization and a simple upwind scheme do not always provide the required computational efficiency or sufficiently accurate resolution of the flow field. From a modelling perspective, closure schemes required in volume-averaged formulations, such as the generalized Leverett J function for capillary pressure, are specific to certain media (e.g. lithologic media) and are not valid for fibrous porous media, which are of central interest in fuel cells. This thesis presents a set of algorithms that are integrated efficiently to achieve computations that are more than two orders of magnitude faster compared to traditional techniques. The method uses an adaptive operator splitting method based on an a posteriori criterion to separate the flow from the transport equations which eliminates unnecessary and costly solution of the implicit pressure-velocity term at every time step; adaptive meshing to reduce the size of the discretized problem; efficient block preconditioned solver techniques for fast solution of the discrete equations; and a recently developed artificial diffusion strategy to stabilize the numerical solution of the transport equation. The significant improvements in accuracy and efficiency of the approach is demosntrated using numerical experiments in 2D and 3D. The method is also extended to advection-dominated problems to specifically investigate two-phase flow in heterogeneous porous media involving capillary transport. Both hydrophilic and hydrophobic media are considered, and insights relevant to fuel cell electrodes are discussed.

abstract: This thesis focuses on studying the interaction between floating objects and an air-water flow system driven by gravity. The system consists of an inclined channel in which a gravity driven two phase flow carries a series of floating solid objects downstream. Numerical simulations of such a system requires the solution of not only the basic Navier-Stokes equation but also dynamic interaction between the solid body and the two-phase flow. In particular, this requires embedding of dynamic mesh within the two-phase flow. A computational fluid dynamics solver, ANSYS fluent, is used to solve this problem. Also, the individual components for these simulations are already available in the solver, few examples exist in which all are combined. A series of simulations are performed by varying the key parameters, including density of floating objects and mass flow rate at the inlet. The motion of the floating objects in those simulations are analyzed to determine the stability of the coupled flow-solid system. The simulations are successfully performed over a broad range of parametric values. The numerical framework developed in this study can potentially be used in applications, especially in assisting the design of similar gravity driven systems for transportation in manufacturing processes. In a small number of the simulations, two kinds of numerically instability are observed. One is characterized by a sudden vertical acceleration of the floating object due to a strong imbalance of the force acting on the body, which occurs when the mass flow of water is weak. The other is characterized by a sudden vertical movement of air-water interface, which occurs when two floating objects become too close together. These new types of numerical instability deserve future studies and clarifications. This study is performed only for a 2-D system. Extension of the numerical framework to a full 3-D setting is recommended as future work. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Mechanical Engineering 2018

This thesis investigates violent air-water flows in two and three dimensions using a smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) model accelerated using the parallel architecture of graphics processing units (GPUs). SPH is a meshless Lagrangian technique for CFD simulations, whose major advantage for multi-phase flows is that the highly nonlinear behaviour of the motion of the interface can be implicitly captured with a sharp interface. However, prior to this thesis performing multi-phase simulations of large scale air-water flows has been prohibitive due to the inherent high computational cost. The open source code DualSPHysics, a hybrid central processing unit (CPU) and GPU code, is heavily modified in order to be able to handle flows with multiple fluids by implementing a weakly compressible multi-phase model that is simple to implement on GPUs. The computational runtime shows a clear improvement over a conventional serial code for both two- and three dimensional cases enabling simulations with millions of particles. An investigation into different GPU algorithms focuses on optimising the multi-phase SPH implementation for the first time, leading to speedups of up to two orders of magnitude compared to a CPU-only simulation. Detailed comparison of different GPU algorithms reveals a further 12% improvement on the computational runtime. Enabling the modelling of cases with millions of fluid particles demonstrates some previously unreported problems regarding the simulation of the air phase. A new particle shifting algorithm has been proposed for multi-phase flows enabling the air, initially simulated as a highly compressible liquid, to expand rapidly as a gas and prevent the formation of unphysical voids. The new shifting algorithm is validated using dam break flows over a dry bed where good agreement is obtained with experimental data and reference solutions published in the literature. An improvement over a corresponding single-phase SPH simulation is also shown. Results for dam break flows over a wet bed are shown for different resolutions performing simulations that were unfeasible prior to the GPU multi-phase SPH code. Good agreement with the experimental results and a clear improvement over the single-phase model are obtained with the higher resolution showing closer agreement with the experimental results. Sloshing inside a rolling tank was also examined and was found to be heavily dependent on the viscosity model and the speed of sound of the phases. A sensitivity analysis was performed for a range of different values comparing the results to experimental data with the emphasis on the pressure impact on the wall. Finally, a 3-D gravity-driven flow where water is impacting an obstacle was studied comparing results with published experimental data. The height of the water at different points in the domain and the pressure on the side of the obstacle are compared to a state-of-the-art single-phase GPU SPH simulation. The results obtained were generally in good agreement with the experiment with closer results obtained for higher resolutions and showing an improvement on the single-phase model.

Nach einer kurzen technischen Beschreibung der Mehrzweck-Thermohydraulikversuchsanlage TOPFLOW und der verwendeten Messtechnik werden die theoretischen Grundlagen zur Modellierung der Kondensation von Dampf in einer Wasserströmung erläutert. Dabei gehen die Autoren besonders auf die Auswahl geeigneter Modelle zur Beschreibung des Wärmeübergangs und der Zwischenphasengrenzfläche im Druckbereich zwischen 10 und 65 bar detailliert ein. Außerdem werden verschiedene Drift-Flux-Modelle auf ihre Tauglichkeit anhand von experimentellen Daten geprüft. Da Veränderungen thermodynamischer und strömungstechnischer Parameter hauptsächlich in axialer Richtung stattfinden, wurden diese Modelle in einen eindimensionalen Code eingebettet, mit dem der Strömungsverlauf entlang einer vertikalen Rohrleitung mit einer Länge von 8 m und einem Nenndurchmesser von 200 mm berechnet werden kann. Anschließend werden Aufbau und Funktion dieses Programms vorgestellt. Nachfolgend vergleichen die Autoren experimentelle und berechnete Strömungsverläufe bei der Kondensation von Dampf sowohl in einer unterkühlten Wasserströmung als auch nahe der Siedetemperatur. Dabei wird der Einfluss wichtiger Randbedingungen, wie z.B. Druck oder Primärblasengröße, auf die Kondensationsintensität analysiert. Eine Einschätzung der Fehlerbanden für die experimentellen Daten, die verwendeten Gittersensoren und die numerische Simulation schließen den Bericht ab.