News
Liquids confined in pores a few nanometers across play a dominant role in many natural and technological processes ranging from clay swelling, frost heave, and catalysis via colloidal stability and protein folding to transport across artificial nanostructures in chemical reactors. In nanoporous media the geometrical confinement and pore wall-fluid interactions as well as complex pore morphologies may significantly alter physico-chemical equilibrium and non-equilibrium properties of liquids, causing, for example, the molecular structuring of the fluid, huge negative Laplace pressures in the liquid and changed shear viscosities.
Guest lecture by Prof. Patrick Huber (Hamburg University of Technology TUHH) on the 24th of November 2021
Guest lecture by Prof. Fabrice Patisson (Mines Nancy) on the 19th of October 2021
Doctoral Researcher’s Workshop
13 – 14 September 2021 in Hannover
The doctoral and post-doctoral researchers of the CRC organized a two-day workshop, which addressed scientific aspects of the CRC/TRR and also included team-building activities. With a Trans-disciplinary Creative Collage on knowledge interchange and the CRC Quiz: “Who wants to be a BULK REACTOR?” the PhD students and PostDocs were able to foster their team spirit and promote networking.
Retreat
14 – 15 September 2021 in Hannover
The goal of the retreat was to revisit the research strategy of BULK-REACTION. Through a poster session with updates from the individual research projects and topical discussions about important aspects of the CRC, bottlenecks and problems were identified and solutions developed.
Two guest speakers were invited to review the development of BULK-REACTION and to give advice on potential future research topics:
Dr. Paul Alps (EEW Energy from Waste GmbH) – Heat exchange problems in fluidized bed heat exchanger of an RDF CFB Plant
Prof. Stefan Pirker (JKU Linz) – Existing challenges and novel potentials for DEM and CFD-DEM Simulations
13 – 15 September 2021 in Hannover
Guest lecture by Dr. Christoph Kirsch (Zurich University of
Applied Sciences) on the 9th of September 2021
Guest lecture by Prof. Aimy Bazylak (University of Toronto) on the 15th of June 2021
Mass transfer in gas/liquid systems is of prime interest for several areas (medicine, chemical engineering, environmental purpose, wastewater treatment, etc.). Some techniques enable a direct visualization of this complex phenomenon and thus represent a powerful tool for understanding the different mechanisms governing the mass transfer. The purpose of this presentation is to illustrate the combination of different techniques to visualize and quantify accurately both hydrodynamics and mass transfer around different gas/liquid interfaces. Specifics focuses are done on the atomization of droplets, formation of bubble in micro-channel and on the study of mass transfer in presence of surfactant in bubble columns.
Guest lecture by Prof. Nicolas Dietrich (l) and Prof. Gilles Hebrard (r) (INSA Toulouse) on the 1st of June 2021
My research aims to provide fundamental explanations to sand behaviour phenomena that have been observed in laboratory experiments or in geotechnical engineering construction. Most of my research exploits DEM. This talk will focus on two strands of research. Firstly I will discuss some of the consideration we have given to the flow of water and suspended solids through sand. I will discuss how we have used CFD to identify how the pore-space topology determines sand permeability. I will also consider some of the challenges associated with using DEM-CFD in coupled simulations of dense, fluid saturated particle systems. The second part of the talk will look at bi-modal granular materials, i.e. mixtures comprising a large and a relatively small size fraction. The behaviour of these materials does not always confirm to the expected behaviour characteristics for sand. Some consideration has been given to meaning of packing density in these materials and we have recently looked at this using DEM. The variation in the way stress is transmitted amongst the different size fractions will also be discussed. Finally I will look at how the stress: deformation response varies with both the volumetric content of the finer particles and the size ratio of the two particle fractions.
Guest lecture by Prof. Catherine O’Sullivan (Imperial College London) on the 11th of May 2021
Guest lecture by Prof. Harald Kruggel-Emden (TU-Berlin) on the 19th of February 2021
A multitude of engineering applications and physical problems are complex in nature and include a number of separate physical processes that all contribute to the entire application on usually different length and time scales. These applica-tions are as diverse as engineering, astrophysics, material science e.g. additive manufacturing, biology, energy e.g. biomass, environmental science, thermal processing and pharmaceutical industry to name a few. In order to understand the interaction between different physical processes, researchers combine existing models to represent multi-physics/scale applications. In particular, a class of multi-physics problems, that include a discrete phase as a particulate material that is in contact with a fluid phase is of large importance. A major challenge lies in coupling the granular material through heat, mass and momentum exchange to the fluid phase, sometimes a reacting multi-phase flow, so that the overall model is accurate enough and can be executed efficiently on modern computing resources including high performance computing (HPC).
Guest lecture by Prof. Bernhard Peters (University of Luxembourg) on the 8th of December 2020
Researchers at the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, together with partners from the Ruhr University Bochum, want to reduce the enormous amount of energy and raw materials used in large-scale industrial particle production processes.
06. July 2020
10 million euros for research against waste of resources
29. May 2020
