The LEAT uses both the commercial software ANSYS Fluent and the open-source package OpenFOAM. 

The software packages are applied to various tasks, such as simulating spray roasting reactors, cement rotary kilns and calciners, pyrolysis reactors, reformers in the chemical industry, or dust combustion in power plants.

Contact: Dr. Enric Illana

The LEAT has developed specialized flight and burnout models for so-called alternative fuels, also called refuse derived fuels (RDF). Alternative fuels are processed waste materials derived from fractions such as paper, wood, textiles, 2D and 3D plastics, and fine particles. These models can be integrated with CFD programs ANSYS Fluent and OpenFOAM.
The flight models account for statistical distributions of lift and drag coefficients of the complex-shaped particles. Lift and drag coefficients are experimentally determined at the institute. The burnout models differentiate between char-forming (e.g., wood) and non-char-forming (e.g., plastic) fractions. The thermochemical and physical properties of these fractions can be individually specified.
The applicability of these models in power plant combustion systems and cement production facilities has been successfully demonstrated. For cement production, these models can be coupled with models describing the formation of the wall deposits in rotary kilns and the formation of cement clinker phases.

Contact: Prof. Viktor Scherer

The LEAT maintains and develops a code for Discrete Element Method (DEM) simulations. The DEM code calculates the movement of particles, their interactions with each other, and their interactions with surrounding walls and structures. A key feature of the LEAT code is its capability to describe thermally thick, chemically reactive particles of complex shapes. The code is coupled with the CFD solver OpenFOAM.
Typical applications for which this code has been utilized include: biomass combustion, municipal waste incineration, blast furnaces, lime shaft kilns, pyrolysis reactors, and clinker coolers.

Contact: Dr. Enric Illana

The LEAT uses the open-source software Cantera to address questions in the field of thermochemistry. Cantera allows for the solution of complex chemical kinetics, provides thermodynamic data, and is capable of calculating thermochemical transport processes.
For example, Cantera is employed at LEAT for simplified calculations of oxy-fuel fired lime shaft kilns.

Contact: M.Sc. Bo Jaeger

Aspen Plus is a commercial software for (one-dimensional) simulation of thermochemical processes. It allows for the modeling and balancing of complex reactor networks.
In research, LEAT uses the software to calculate, for example, the conversion of blast furnace gases into chemical value-added products.

Contact: M.Sc. Bo Jaeger

The LEAT has access to a powerful computing network for data processing, connected via fiber optics to the LEAT server room. A high-performance parallel computing system (cluster), equipped with current-generation AMD EPYC processors, provides the computational power required. The system uses 64-bit compute nodes with ECC memory and server-standard hard drives. For fast communication within the cluster, modern InfiniBand infrastructure with transfer rates up to 200Gbps is utilized.
This modularly expandable system is employed for numerical simulations in CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) and DEM (Discrete Element Method), which have very high demands for computational capacity and storage. Whether using commercial or open-source software, and whether computations are performed with MPI, openMP, or CUDA, the system is designed to meet the needs of simulation experts.

Contact: M.Sc. Maximilian Brömmer