Internally funded project
Start date : 01.10.2004
End date : 31.12.2005
The production of nanoscaled particles with specific characeristics is crucial for many applications. To improve understanding of the properties of such aggregates in fluid suspensions we use the Lattice Boltzmann method. This allows us to determine basic parameters for single aggregates, like the drag force. More complex problems like the breaking in shear flow or further agglomeration of the molecules can also be simulated this way.
Our approach requires the incorporation of boundary conditions for moving obstacles into the fluid simulation to calculate the bidirectional influences of fluid and obstacles. Furthermore the behaviour of the aggregates themselves can be computed using a rigid body physics simulation. We are currently working on including the effects of long range potentials into the simulation. To compute segregation processes with many aggregates and larger regions of fluid, the implementation will be parallelized to run on large clusters or supercomputers.