Coarse-grained computation for particle coagulation and sintering processes by linking Quadrature Method of Moments with Monte-Carlo

  • Authors:

  • Yu Zou;Michail E. Kavousanakis;Ioannis G. Kevrekidis;Rodney O. Fox

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Chemical Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA;Department of Chemical Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA;Department of Chemical Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA and Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA;Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011, USA

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Computational Physics
  • Year:
  • 2010

Quantified Score

Hi-index 31.45

Visualization

Abstract

The study of particle coagulation and sintering processes is important in a variety of research studies ranging from cell fusion and dust motion to aerosol formation applications. These processes are traditionally simulated using either Monte-Carlo methods or integro-differential equations for particle number density functions. In this paper, we present a computational technique for cases where we believe that accurate closed evolution equations for a finite number of moments of the density function exist in principle, but are not explicitly available. The so-called equation-free computational framework is then employed to numerically obtain the solution of these unavailable closed moment equations by exploiting (through intelligent design of computational experiments) the corresponding fine-scale (here, Monte-Carlo) simulation. We illustrate the use of this method by accelerating the computation of evolving moments of uni- and bivariate particle coagulation and sintering through short simulation bursts of a constant-number Monte-Carlo scheme.