Feb 2023
Structured packings in reactors have an extensive trait for process intensification such as enhancement in mass and heat transport without having any substantial drop in pressure. These Structured packings have enhanced the available surface area per volume and can now successfully be produced by using additive manufacturing methods such as 3D printing. The 2D design of structured packings has brought significant process intensification to various chemical engineering processes, with this as a base it is expected that 3D designs with unique structures can also result in additional process improvements. Two different types of geometries have been explored for the enhancement of surface area; Lattices and triple periodical minimum surfaces (TPMS). Lattices have a higher surface area but their mixing properties are not up to the mark. This implies that thermal transport within the system using lattices can rather be poor. On the contrary, TPMS structures do not have high surface areas but their mixing properties are quite good, which is an indication of good thermal transport. A possible way to improve the surface area of a TPMS structure is to imprint a polygonal array of cylinders over them. In this way, the surface area can be increased and at the same time volume occupied by the solid will decrease.
Pressure drop and thermal field across these TPMS structures can thoroughly be analyzed using CFD. In the present study, several TPMS structures with different topologies are employed and CFD simulations were carried out to analyze the pressure drop and heat transfer across them under varying operating conditions.
My name is Mohammad Asif, I am a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Roorkee, India. My Ph.D. research topic was “Convective flow across a porous array of cylinders with application to nanofluids”. At present, I am working as a Postdoctoral fellow in AMPM and KCC with Prof. Carlos Grande’s research group “Intensification of Material and Processes” (IMAP). I have expertise in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and published six research papers in renowned journals, one of which is recently published with Prof. Carlos Grande and is the first paper of our research group (IMAP) at KAUST. I have presented three papers and one poster at four different international conferences. I have also worked on other industrial problems apart from my Ph.D. research topic such as “CFD simulation of particle separation in a hydrocyclone” and “Prediction of chemical rate of reaction in a catalytic reactor by implementing CFD”.