1D and 2D porous media fixed bed reactor simulations with DUO

Fixed bed reactor simulations are often based on a porous media model with a single energy equation for the combined fluid and solid phases. In this energy equation, an effective thermal conductivity (which takes into account both the fluid and solid properties) is typically utilized. DUO (DETCHEM und OpenFOAM) has been extended to model porous media reactions in 1D and 2D, including the effects of packed bed effective thermal conductivity and intra-particle diffusion. For the 1D model, correlations for the wall Nusselt number and the overall heat transfer coefficient are used to capture radial heat transfer effects. With these approaches, reactor simulation times have been reduced from hundreds or thousands of core hours required for 3D Particle Resolved Computational Fluid Dynamics (PRCFD), to core minutes/hours for a 2D porous media model, to core seconds/minutes for a 1D porous media model, while maintaining fidelity to the 3D CFD and experimental comparison data sets. Supporting examples include catalytic steam methane reforming, catalytic dry reforming of methane, and heat transfer in an empty tube.