CBI-Colloquium “Modelling multiphase flow equipment for a sustainable future”

Prof. Johan Padding is full professor and chair of Complex Fluid Processing in the Department of Process and Energy (P&E) of Delft University of Technology. He has an MSc in applied physics and a PhD in chemical physics from University of Twente, focusing on microscale and mesoscale simulations of soft matter. After several postdocs in Cambridge (UK), Twente (NL) and Louvain-la-Neuve (BE), Johan got a tenured position at Eindhoven University of Technology in 2011 where he shifted his attention to larger scale multiphase flows. He moved to Delft University of Technology in 2016. Currently, Johan does research on multiphase flows, mesoscale transport phenomena and heterogeneous catalysis, with applications in the fields of chemical conversions in fluidised beds, spray drying, crystallisation, and chemical reactor design, including electrochemical conversion.

Title: Modelling multiphase flow equipment for a sustainable future

The energy transition requires development of new conversion and separation equipment. The design and scale-up of such equipment requires fast models that can predict hydrodynamics, heat- and mass transfer, chemical conversion and phase transitions, usually in multi-phase systems. Unfortunately, these phenomena depend sensitively on small-scale events such as surface reactions or collisions between particles or droplets. It is therefore necessary to employ a multiscale modelling approach in which correlations are extracted from detailed small-scale models and fed into larger-scale models. In this talk I will give some examples from our group, highlighting our work on fluidised beds containing elongated particles and on electrochemical reactors for CO2 conversion.