Abstract
Fractionating columns are used for most of all technical distillation processes. The fundamental understanding of the principles of these critical components is often only provided in theory or in small-scaled laboratory setups.
The concept and application presented in this paper aim at educators who wish to offer their students the possibility for individual experimentation in the context of process engineering and more specifically plate columns. A dynamic, immersive virtual lab may solve the problem of not representing real-life dimensions and allows to show of the direct impact of internal structural changes not only in theory or graphs, but with real-time fluid and particle simulations.
For this reason, the relevant areas of a plate column, such as the infeed area, the column head, the condenser, the column sump and vaporizer are 3D visualized and backed up by McCabe–Thiele diagrams to show the consequences of changes in the design of the column. The virtual lab application was compiled as an executable Windows application with multiple views in 3D and 2D containing dynamic fluid simulations, which were then optimized for performance.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the undergraduate students Lasse Christian Bömkes, Jan Niklas Gößling and Ioannis M. Nikolaou Bennour who were part of the development team for this virtual laboratory.
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Wolf, M., Trentsios, P., Gerhard, D. (2022). Real-Time Fluid Simulation for an Interactive Plate Column Virtual Lab. In: Auer, M.E., Bhimavaram, K.R., Yue, XG. (eds) Online Engineering and Society 4.0. REV 2021. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 298. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82529-4_26
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82529-4_26
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