SBIR-STTR Award

This Small Business Innovative Research Phase I project will develop an engineering design level simulation tool for non-Newtonian flow systems, such as polymers and suspensions used in advanced materials engineering and process design. Recently developed innovative modeling of rheological properties at a mesoscopic level, using a rate-of-strain dependent relaxation time in the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM), will be used. Validation studies will include quantitative analysis of "spurt" in pressure-driven flow and persistent oscillations in piston-driven flow followed by a qualitative pilot study of polymeric flow in a complex geometrical industrial prototype device. This project will produce design tools that are urgently needed to overcome physical and/or engineering limits in various manufacturing and processing industries, Potential applications include coating and fiber spinning, design and production of new processes and materials for filled and unfilled silicones, diesel powerplant and emissions, injection molding, environmentally benign processes, drag reduction in naval engineering, and ant-icing aircraft sprays.

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop an engineering design level simulation tool for non-Newtonian fluid systems used in advanced materials engineering/process design. The project will implement innovative physics modeling of rheological properties and will leverage the full computational strength of the company's PowerFLOW simulator, including automatic grid generation for arbitrarily complex geometry and perfect parallel scalability on cluster computers using hundreds of million computational cells. This project will convert the hydrokinetic software resulting from Phase I project into a stable and robust technology platform that can be fully commercialized. The broader impact/commercial potential from the technology will be virtual design tools to overcome physical and/or engineering limits in flow simulations of chemicals, food products, pharmaceuticals, and nutritional processing, disk drive manufacturing, environmentally benign processes, semiconductor equipment, anti-icing aircraft sprays, etc. The tool for non-Newtonian flow prediction will open new commercial markets for the PowerFLOW technology. Key advantages include grid generation and set up times, thus enabling shortened product/process development cycles, optimization to improve yield and energy efficiency, and environmental improvements