Development of an Efficient Stabilized Navier-Stokes Solver to Simulate Turbulent Flows in Process-Intensified Devices

From biofuel production to pharmaceuticals, the chemical industry is constantly trying to improve processes in terms of sustainability and efficiency. This domain is known as Process Intensification (PI) in chemical engineering. It consists of the design of equipments that enhance mass and heat transfer without negatively affecting the environment and process costs through innovation in terms of size, geometry, and operating conditions. Some examples of process-intensified devices include Hi-Gee (high-gravity) equipment, static mixers, and reactive distillation towers. These process-intensified devices have common characteristics that can be summarized as follows: complex (curved) geometries, concurrent physical phenomena (turbulence, energy and mass transfer, chemical reactions) and (rotating) transient incompressible flows at an intermediate Reynolds number (Re ∈ [103, 105]). The hydrodynamics within these devices are complex, and experimental methods are no longer sufficient to fully characterize the flow behavior. Moreover, the number of variables that can be optimized leads to a large number of experiments that need to be performed, which ultimately translate into a large investment of time and money. Therefore, numerical modeling of the flow, also known as Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), plays an important role in overcoming these limitations within PI. The simulation of flows is an active research field that focuses on the numerical approxima-tion of the solution of the Navier–Stokes equations. The present work aims at developing an efficient stabilized Navier–Stokes solver to simulate the incompressible turbulent flows en-countered in process-intensified devices. Such a solver should be able to accurately model the physics of turbulent flow at reasonable computational cost for a variety of configurations and a wide range of flow conditions. This requires a detailed study of the turbulence modeling aspect and the numerical resolution behind the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations.