Hello,

I would really appreciate your opinion:

two phase flow or combustion, which one has more industry applications and which one relies more on accurate turbulent flow prediction ?

Is there any future for biofluid dynamics ? or the job won't be important compared to those pure biological research done by biologists.

Thank you for your reply.

Don't_know_what_to_do_next

Good question...I would like to know whether Bio-fluids will fade away as pure-biological sciences become more prevalant. Also, Is there a connection between biofluids and combustion in terms of techniques? Apart from the obvious. Cheers.

You can do combustion of two-phase media, e.g., combustion of gases with liquid droplets or solid particles.

Angen

... or maybe still better - combustion of two-phase biofluid media...

These are interesting questions. I work in the combustion and heat transfer area and it seems to be a very strong field within CFD, judging application-wise. Two-phase flow simulations are also extremely useful but it seems to me that rather as a part of broader class of physical problems, e.g. involving combustion, boiling, fluidised beds etc.

Much dependes on whether you are interested only in applications as your questions suggest, or if you rather consider code development or research in academia as realistic options for you career too. And finally, your nationality or university at which you will/can do your PhD will define the direction of your future to a very large extent.

As to the turbulence-related question, this cannot be answered simply (as if the others could). It always dependes, what accuracy you need and this tells you what type of turbulence modelling you must work with. I think that combustion is again a good adept at being very difficult from the viewpoint of turbulence treatment. But e.g. two-fluid problems which need Eulerian modelling of both phases definitely pose a challenge as well.

Good luck George

Thank you very much indeed for your reply. It is really helpful. I am interested in a field that will be good to stay as an academy in the future.

Could you told me that what kind of industry will be involved with combustion ? What I could think of are combustion in turbines, engines, buildings or forest. Anywhere else ?

Do you know what kind of industry demands accurate simulation of turbulent two phase flow ? It seems that LES for combustion is just a common practice for many universities nowadays but not much work has been done on LES for two phase flow. Does this mean that research on LES for two phase flow was not required or supported (by industry) as much as LES for combustions ? Also, it seems that there are quite a lot good books on combustion but not so many on two phase flow. Can this be also an indication that two phase flow research were not supported as much as combustion ?

Your insights will be very much appreciated.

Don't_know_what_to_do_next

Well, as for industrial applications of combustion, engines and various furnaces/combustion chambers are probably the leading segments.

As to LES in combustion: LES is just a technique for turbulence modelling, so it really doesn't say what approach people use for the chemical part of the computations. But I would not be so optimistic saying that universities do LES of combustion routinely, it very much depends on flame type etc. E.g. for industrial applications of furnaces, LES is still not viable due to huge CPU demands.

Your observations about two-phase flows are correct, I would just add that two-phase flows of industrial importance are often just too difficult to be simulated by CFD. (Spray atomisation, flow in tubes with evaporating medium, and so on.)

Regards

George