DEM particle upscaling for large-scale bulk handling equipment and material interaction

Purpose: The development of bulk material handling equipment can be accelerated and made less expensive when testing of virtual prototypes is adopted. However, the modelling of a grab unloader requires a large volume (77 m3) of iron ore pellets, making the computational costs prohibitive. This paper investigates the extent to which the...

Euler-Lagrange analysis towards representative down-scaling of a 22 m3 aerobic S. cerevisiae fermentation

With reaction timescales equal to or shorter than the circulation time, the ideal mixing assumption typically does not hold for large scale bioreactors. As a consequence large scale gradients in extra-cellular conditions such as the substrate concentration exist, which may significantly impact the metabolism of micro-organisms and thereby the...

Lagrangian modeling of hydrodynamic–kinetic interactions in (bio)chemical reactors: Practical implementation and setup guidelines

Large substrate concentration gradients can exist in chemical or biochemical reactions, resulting from a large circulation time compared to the turnover time of substrates. The influence of such gradients on the microbial metabolism can significantly compromise optimal bioreactor performance. Lapin et al. (2004) proposed an Euler–Lagrange CFD...

Euler-Lagrange computational fluid dynamics for (bio)reactor scale down: An analysis of organism lifelines

The trajectories, referred to as lifelines, of individual microorganisms in an industrial scale fermentor under substrate limiting conditions were studied using an Euler-Lagrange computational fluid dynamics approach. The metabolic response to substrate concentration variations along these lifelines provides deep insight in the dynamic...