A conservative finite volume method for the population balance equation with aggregation, fragmentation, nucleation and growth
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Author(s)
O’Sullivan, Daniel
Rigopoulos, Stelios
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
In the present paper, we present a method for solving the population balance equation (PBE) with the complete range of kinetic processes included: namely aggregation, fragmentation, nucleation and growth. The method is based on the finite volume scheme and features guaranteed conservation of the first moment by construction, accurate prediction of the size distribution, applicability to an arbitrary non-uniform grid, robustness and computational efficiency which is instrumental for coupling with computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The treatment of aggregation is based on the previous work by Liu and Rigopoulos (2019). An analysis of the aggregation terms in the PBE is made, and the source of conservation error in finite element/volume methods is elucidated. It is subsequently shown how this error is overcome in the present method via a coordinate transformation applied to the aggregation birth double integral resulting from the application of the finite volume method. The contributions to the birth term are delineated and their corresponding death fluxes identified. An aggregation map is then constructed for mapping birth and death fluxes, thus allowing the finite volume method to operate in terms of fluxes and achieve conservation of mass. The method is then extended to fragmentation, for which a map is also constructed to represent the birth and death fluxes. In the implementation, the aggregation and fragmentation maps are pre-tabulated to allow fast computation. It is also shown how the method can be coupled with a total variation diminishing (TVD) scheme for the treatment of growth with minimal numerical diffusion. The method is validated with a number of test cases including analytical solutions and numerical solutions of the discrete PBE for aggregation (theoretical and free molecule/Brownian kernels), fragmentation, aggregation-fragmentation and aggregation-growth. In all cases, the method produces very accurate results, while also being computationally efficient due to the pre-tabulation of the maps and the simplicity of the algorithm carried out per time step.
Date Issued
2022-12-14
Date Acceptance
2022-07-15
Citation
Chemical Engineering Science, 2022, 263
ISSN
0009-2509
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Journal / Book Title
Chemical Engineering Science
Volume
263
Copyright Statement
© 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.
This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
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Sponsor
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
Subjects
0904 Chemical Engineering
0913 Mechanical Engineering
0914 Resources Engineering and Extractive Metallurgy
Chemical Engineering
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
ARTN 117925
Date Publish Online
2022-07-30