Feiguo Chen

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Associate) at Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences

It is well accepted that the drag coefficients of incompressible flows past a sphere only depend on the Reynolds number Re. However, the influence of the Mach number Ma on the drag coefficient becomes increasingly obvious for flows with higher Mach numbers. Unfortunately, this influence has not yet been well understood. In this work, a numerical me...

With meshfree and fully Lagrangian features of particle methods, smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) is suitable to achieve high-accurate simulations of multiphase flows with large interfacial deformations, discontinuities, and multi-physics. In this review, the basic concept of SPH is first briefly introduced. Then, various implementations of SP...

Gas-solid fluidization is intrinsically dynamic and manifests meso-scale structures spanning a wide range of length and time scales. When involved with reactions, more complex phenomena emerge and thus pose bigger challenges for modeling. As the meso-scale is critical to understand multiphase reactive flows which the conventional two-fluid model (T...

The discrete element method (DEM) is used to analyze complex practical granular systems; however, the representation of real shapes is an important consideration because behavior of non-spherical particles is unlike that of spherical particles both individually and collectively. In this study, we use non-uniform rational basis-splines (NURBS) to de...

Direct numerical simulation (DNS) of gas–solid flow at high resolution has been carried out by coupling the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) for gas flow and the discrete element method (DEM) for solid particles. However, the body force periodic boundary condition (FPBC) commonly used to cut down the huge computational cost of such simulation has fac...

In the methanol-to-olefins (MTO) process, coke deposition is closely related to the selectivity of light olefins. Previous simulations of different-sized MTO reactors using two-fluid model (TFM) combined with the EMMS (energy minimization multi-scale)-based drag well predict the hydrodynamic behaviors but poorly predict the product distribution of...

Multiphase chemical reactors with characteristic multiscale structures are intrinsically discrete at the elemental scale. However, due to the lack of multiscale models and the limitation of computational capability, such reactors are traditionally treated as continua through straightforward averaging in engineering simulations or as completely disc...

Eulerian-lagrangian simulation of bubbly flow has the advantage of tracking the motion of bubbles in continuous fluid, and hence the position and velocity of each bubble could be accurately acquired. Previous simulation usually used the hard-sphere model for bubble-bubble interactions, assuming that bubbles are rigid spheres and the collisions betw...

In this study, flow regions in flat bottomed cylindrical gravity-driven hoppers are investigated in terms of velocity and voidage distributions of particles via GPU-based DEM (discrete element method) simulation. For the first time, the hopper flow with steady discharge is described as nine regions which are essential and critical for better unders...

Eulerian-Lagrangian method is becoming more and more popular for the simulation of dispersed multiphase flow as the computational ability grows. An important issue in this method is the handle of collisions. Until now, both hard-sphere and soft-sphere models have been used extensively in the simulation of gas-solid systems while in gas-liquid syste...

Micro-scale discrete particle method (DPM) and meso-scale computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations, both based on the energy-minimization multi-scale (EMMS) model, were carried out on the complex gas-solid flow in the regenerators of fluid catalytic cracking (FCC), aiming to provide visualized quantitative analysis for the performance improve...

The theory of flow similarity has not been well established for granular flows, in contrast to the case for conventional fluids, owing to a lack of reliable and general constitutive laws for their continuum description. A rigorous investigation of the similarity of velocity fields in different granular systems would be valuable to theoretical studi...

To address the challenge of virtual process engineering (VPE), a systematic co-design of the physical model, numerical software, and computer hardware was conducted, eventually leading to the so-called EMMS Paradigm, which can greatly accelerate simulation speed while reducing its cost. Following this paradigm, a multiscale software framework was d...

This chapter serves as an introduction to the supercomputing works carried out at CAS-IPE following the strategy of structural consistency among the physics in the simulated systems, mathematical model, computational software expressing the numerical methods and algorithms, and finally architecture of the computer hardware (Li et al., From multisca...

Though discrete particle simulation (DPS) has been widely used for investigating gas–solid flows from a more detailed level as compared to traditional two-fluid models (TFMs), it is still seriously limited by the computational cost when large scale systems are simulated. GPUs (graphic processing units), with their massive parallel architecture and...

One of the fundamental challenges to chemical engineering is the vast scale difference between molecular structures that define the properties or functions of the chemical products and the reactors or equipments that actually produce these materials, it typically ranges from 10-10m and 10-15s to 101m and 103s, and can be even wider. In particular,...

Real-time simulation of industrial equipment is a huge challenge nowadays. The high performance and fine-grained parallel computing provided by graphics processing units (GPUs) bring us closer to our goals. In this article, an industrial-scale rotating drum is simulated using simplified discrete element method (DEM) without consideration of the tan...

With the dramatic development of computational science and technology, computer simulation is playing an increasingly important role in scientific research and engineering practice, and is believed to bring about a profound revolution to the mode and means of these activities. For chemical engineering, it will promote the transition from an experie...

Due to significant multi-scale heterogeneity, understanding sub-grid structures is critical to effective continuum-based description of gas–solid flow. However, it is challenging for both physical measurements and numerical simulations. In this article, with the macro-scale pseudo-particle method (MaPPM) implemented on a GPU-based HPC system, up to...

Pseudo-particle modeling (PPM), a molecular modeling method which combines time-driven algorithms and hard molecule modeling, was originally developed for simulating gas in complex multiphase systems (Ge & Li, 2003; Ge et al., 2005; Ge, 1998). In this work, the properties of two- and three-dimensional pseudo-particle systems, namely, mean free path...

A supercomputer with 1.0 Petaflops peak performance in single precision, designed and established by Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, is introduced in this brief communication. A designing philosophy utilizing the similarity between hardware, software and the problems to be solved is embodied, based on the multi-scale...

Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) was used to design and implement molecular dynamics (MD) simulations on graphics processing units (GPU). With an NVIDIA Tesla C870, a 20–60 fold speedup over that of one core of the Intel Xeon 5430 CPU was achieved, reaching up to 150 Gflops. MD simulation of cavity flow and particle-bubble interaction in...

We couple pseudo-particle modeling (PPM, Ge and Li in Chem Eng Sci 58(8):1565–1585, 2003), a variant of hard-particle molecular dynamics, with standard soft-particle molecular dynamics (MD) to study an idealized gas–liquid flow in nano-channels. The coupling helps to keep sharp contrast between gas and liquid behaviors and the simulations conducted...

The difficulties of scaling in process engineering lie in the multi-scaling of dynamic structure, the behavior of which becomes progressively involved with increasing scales. Multi-scale methodology looms naturally in practice that reveals the complexity of nature. Traditional hierarchical coarse-graining in continuum approaches has faced fundament...

Multi-scale spatio-temporal structures, the dominant feature for all complex systems, are identified and discussed as a common challenge and frontier in process engineering, as well as in science and technology of many different fields and disciplines. Emphasis is paid to the correlation between different scales, which is one of the focuses in comp...

The velocity profiles and temperature distributions of gas flow in microchannels, for Knudsen numbers ranging from 0.01 to 0.20, are investigated with pseudo-particle modeling (PPM). It has been found that the velocity profiles are mainly affected by Knudsen number and the external force fields applied. When Knudsen number was increased, the slip v...

The multi-scale structures of complex flows have been great challenges to both theoretical and engineering researches, and multi-scale modeling is the natural way in response. Particle methods (PMs) are ideal constitutors and powerful probes of multi-scale models, owing to their physical insight and computational simplicity. In this paper, the role...