Vorcat Simulation of Turbulent Process Flows

Advances in supercomputing have opened up the door to the practical implementation of new, more physically accurate means for simulating the motion of fluids encountered in engineering design. An especially promising avenue is a gridfree method developed by

Vorcat, Inc. that is well suited to the modeling of complex fluid flows that cannot be well treated by traditional methods. Documenting case studies of the performance of VorCat in specialized industrial applications is an important step in finding commercial customers. The goal of this MIPS grant is to take advantage of the unique capabilities of the University of Maryland (UMD) High Shear Mixing Research Program (HSMRP) to develop benchmark examples of the performance of the Vorcat code in flow fields of special interest to the chemical process industry. Expansion into this major segment of engineering software applications is of great importance to the overall success of Vorcat. This project was carried out by a postdoc that we hired from Japan and the HSMRP team at the Chemical Engineering Department at UMD.