An Evaluation of RANS Turbulence Models for Structured Foam Reactor Simulation Using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)

The use of structured open-cell foams with high external surface area is gaining importance in industrial applications due to more energy efficiency and less pressure drop. Furthermore, the computational fluid dynamic technique has been largely used in reactor designing. This work consists of testing different two-equation turbulence models to calculate the numerical solution of the Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations in order to assess the numerical stability, grid independence and computational effort to achieve an accurate result for pressure drop along the reactor. Also, it is shown the geometry construction of structured open-cell foam reactors and grid generation. The numerical results are compared using pressure drop empirical correlations.