Title:	Turbulent drop breakup mechanisms in high-pressure homogenizers
DNr:	SNIC 2021/5-519
Project Type:	SNIC Medium Compute
Principal Investigator:	Andreas Håkansson <andreas.hakansson@food.lth.se>
Affiliation:	Lunds universitet
Duration:	2021-11-30 – 2022-12-01
Classification:	21101 20306 20499
Homepage:	http://www.food.lth.se/
Keywords:

Abstract

The objective of this project is to better understand the different turbulent drop breakup mechanisms. This could be beneficial to various applications and industries including the food industry where more efficient drop breakups in High-Pressure Homogenizers (HPH) and Rotor-Stator Mixers (RSM) could reduce the energy consumption. The overall aim is to improve our fundamental understanding of turbulent drop breakup in HPHs and RSMs by quantifying breakup rates and fragment size distributions. The project includes both an experimental part (breakup visualization in a scale-up model) and resolved Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) simulations. A scale-up model of an HPH gap is designed for the experimental phase of the project and DNS simulations will be performed on the same HPH gap geometry. In the DNS simulations, we aim to obtain the local breakup probabilities as a function of the initial drop diameter and characterize the turbulent field close to the drops. We will use our DNS results along with the results from the experimental phase of the project to acquire a better understanding of the drop breakup mechanisms in HPHs and develop a methodology for obtaining the rate of breakups to be used by the industry