FluidPro Team
If you need to optimise your equipment or mixing process, understanding what is going in inside your tanks is vital. Fluids being blended together at the right speed, distribution and ratio can make a difference between a high or poor quality product – but opening your tanks or creating prototypes to ensure the flow is correct can be costly and time-consuming, and impact your lead times.
Predicting fluid motion within your tank or pipeline using CFD can reduce guesswork and allow you to understand how fluids will behave in different mixing systems, before setting up your equipment or making adjustments to your processes.
What is CFD
CFDs involves a numerical simulation – using algorithms to calculate how fluids and gases will behave within a container. Using these algorithms, a computer simulation can be created, which can show how agitation will occur within a tank in real time. This can help identify spots where agitation is ineffective, fluids are not blending as desired, or heat is not being transferred, so adjustments can be made.
What can CFD calculate?
CFD can help you determine a variety of factors, including:
- Continuity: how fluid mass is conserved, to help create and maintain a steady flow
- Momentum: how your fluid moves throughout the tank and what is required to change its motion
- Turbulence: how fluid motion fluctuates through the tank or static mixer
- Species: how well fluids with different physical properties will blend together
- Heat transfer: how well fluids heat, cool or transfer energy via motion
- Chemical reaction: how properties of fluids or gases change based on how they interact with one another in the fluid mixing process
- Mixing time: how long it will take to blend certain products within a tank based on the flow rate
- Spatial distribution: how well suspended solids will be distributed through the fluid
- Fermentation: how finely air and gas bubbles will be dispersed through a liquid to ensure good mass transfer
Understanding the ways fluids will behave in your tank can help you optimise your agitation processes for a better quality end product.
Why is CFD important?
Building and setting up your agitation and fluid blending operations can be a time consuming and costly process. Once your plant or equipment is set up, it can be difficult and costly to adjust your machinery to fix errors or improve inefficient flow processes. Using algorithms to predict how fluid will blend within your container, based on the fluids used, the size and shape of the tank and the position of the impellers, will allow you to make adjustments prior to actually installing equipment. This means once your equipment is set up in your plant, it should perform effectively right away.
CFD can also assist you in optimising or changing existing equipment – whether to adjust for new processes or to make your current operations more efficient.
How can CFD help you troubleshoot your tank or plant?
By analysing fluid motion within your tank, Computational Fluid Dynamics can pick up on:
- Dead zone
- Adverse or insufficient reactions between materials
- Risk of thermal failure
- Potential energy losses
- Points within the tank where blending is ineffective
Identifying these issues prior to building your plant means they can be eliminated by adjusting the design of your tank and mixers. CFD can help you identify where you will need to make adjustments to:
- The design, number or position of impellers or baffles used
- Agitation speed
- The shape of your tank or vessel
- The ratio of liquids, solids or gases to be blended
CFD Simulation with FluidPro
FluidPro’s expert engineering design team have created numerous CFD analyses for customers in the water treatment, food processing, pharmaceutical and many other industries. We can work with your business to not only design an efficient fluid processing package for your plant, but predict how it will operate and perform, and optimise processes to prevent costly adjustments or repairs down the track. To learn more about our CFD Analysis and how we can help you, contact us.
