Construction of random packed bed catalytic reactor for numerical simulation

Catalytic packed bed reactor has wide application in chemical industries, refineries, and petrochemicals. One of the best methods to study this pilot reactor microscopically and scale to industrial is CFD calculation. At this point there are two different approaches: porous media and particle resolved. Porous media is suitable for large scale but for the pilot, scale particle resolved has more accuracy. The most important problem in the particle resolved approach is making suitable geometry and meshing to have the best result in CFD simulations. In this paper, the packed bed reactor is constructed by the DEM method in Blender open-source software. Then geometry is sent to CAD software for modification and preparation for suitable meshing. Also, used the newest mesh method to have lower computational cost, CPU time, and more accuracy of results. It seems mosaic mesh will be helpful in such complex geometries to reduce the number of mesh cells, increasing convergence and mesh quality. Now suitable geometry and mesh are ready to start CFD simulation!