Bubbles and drops are critical components of important industrial applications such as boiling and condensation, bubble column reactors, electrochemical cells and physical systems involving air entrainment in plunging jets and liquid jet atomization.
Effects of surface tension are important for these applications and present a challenge for numerical simulations.
We develop models, numerical methods and software for simulation of such flows.
People: Petr Karnakov, Sergey Litvinov, Petros Koumoutsakos
Code: Aphros: Finite volume solver for incompressible multiphase flows with surface tension
Membrane-less electrochemical reactors
In traditional electrochemical reactors, the products forming on the electrodes are separated by a membrane. Flow based electrochemical instead rely on hydrodynamic mechanisms to keep the products separated. One of these mechanisms is the Segre-Silberberg effect of lateral migration of a particle in a channel flow: the particle finds a stable equilibrium position near the wall. With proper flow conditions, the gaseous products in the form of bubbles can be kept separated.
Removing the membrane can reduce the ionic resistance of the reactor leading to an increase in power conversion efficiency. This, however, requires strong understanding of the underlying processes. Combining numerical modelling with experiments done by our collaborators, we aim to fully investigate the operation of flow-based electrochemical reactors and provide tools for their optimal design.
Publications
2020
- P. Karnakov, S. Litvinov, and P. Koumoutsakos, “A hybrid particle volume-of-fluid method for curvature estimation in multiphase flows," Int. J. Multiphas. Flow, vol. 125, p. 103209, 2020.