Gas-Liquid Phase Recirculation in Bubble Column Reactors: Development of a Hybrid Model Based on Local CFD – Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS)

Abstract

Abstract The Euler–Euler method and soft computing methods are recently utilized for the purpose of bubbly flow simulation and evolution of the dispersed and continuous phase in a two-phase reactor. Joining computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to the adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) method can enable the researchers to avoid several runs for heavy numerical methods (multidimensional Euler–Euler) to optimize fluid conditions. This overview can also help the researchers to carefully analyze fluid conditions and categorize their huge number of data in their artificial neural network nodes and avoid a complex non-structure CFD mesh. In addition, it can provide a neural geometry without limitation of an increasing mesh number in the fluid domain. In this study, gas and liquid circulation were considered as one of the main CFD factors in the scale-up of reactors used as an output parameter for prediction tool (ANFIS method) in different dimensions. This study shows that a combination of ANFIS and CFD methods provides the non-discrete domain in various dimensions and makes a smart tool to locally predict multiphase flow. The integration of numerical calculation and smart methods also shows that there is a great agreement between CFD results and ANFIS output depending on different dimensions.