Fermentation Bioreactors (current)
The current project that I am working on is about mass transfer intensification with application in fermentation bioreactors. I am using ANSYS Fluent and OpenFOAM for simulating a lab-scale reactor and model developments, accordingly. The project is a collaboration between fluid dynamics division and industrial biotechnology department where the measurements for are carried out.
Gas-Liquid, and Liquid-Liquid Systems (2017-2019)
I worked for 2 years on developing fundamental models for improving the understanding of droplet and gas bubble breakup in turbulent flows. The idea was to improve the breakup kernels for population balance equation to account for the entire turbulent energy spectrum via simulations and experimental validations. For instance the following plot shows the level of improvement achieved by including the entire turbulent spectrum in one of the breakup models (see the green lines). More details about this work is summarized in this presentation.
MoDeNa (2014-2017)
From 2014 to 2017, I was a postdoctoral researcher at Politecnico di Torino working on MoDeNa project. MoDeNa was a multidiciplinary project that aimed at developing, demonstrating and assessing an easy-to-use multi-scale software-modeling framework under an open-source licensing scheme that delivers models with feasible computational loads for process and product design of polyurethane foams. The main scheme behind MoDeNa was to link different modeling tools developed for nano-, meso-, and macro scales with an uniform platform for simulation of foaming process.
Flotation Tanks (2010-2014)
In South Africa from 2010 to 2014, I developed a CFD model for prediction of flotation rate constants in a stirred flotation tank and validated against experimental data. The model incorporated local, time-varying values of the turbulent flow field into an existing kinetic flotation model. The geometry of the tank and the meshing is shown below.
Hydrocyclone (2009-2010)
The modeling of hydrocyclone was the first research project that I worked on. During my master thesis I modeled the separation behavior of this device through experiments, analytical models and CFD for optimization of separation in an iron-processing plant. The Response Surface Method of DOE was applied to optimized the effective parameters on the separation efficiency. The video below shows the flow pattern in a transparent lab-scale hydrocyclone that I designed and manufactured during my work.