Design of adsorption systems by topology optimisation

Abstract

Adsorption is a retention mechanism of fluid molecules on solid surfaces and presents a wide range of applications, such as refrigeration, separation processes and fuel storage. This work describes the modelling of gas adsorption on porous media and presents an optimisation approach for the design of adsorption systems based on topology optimisation. A comprehensive formulation for the adsorption and desorption phenomena is presented, detailing the derivation of their weak forms and assembling the matrices for the implementation of the Finite Element Method (FEM). The sensitivities of objective functions to topology optimisation design variables are obtained by the adjoint method, which is presented in detail. The numerical implementation is aided by FEniCS and Dolfin Adjoint packages, resulting in a generic software for the optimisation of adsorption systems. The method is applied for the design of Adsorbed Natural Gas (ANG) tanks for on-demand consumption. Optimised tank layouts are proposed and compared with standard tanks, presenting improvement of the design objectives.