Applicant
Prof. Dr. Thorsten Pöschel
Institute for Multiscale Simulation of Particulate Systems
Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
Project Overview
Freeze drying is a very important part in many industrial processes, especially when it comes to thermally sensitive materials e.g. in food or pharmaceutical industry. Collagen sponges, for example, used as acellular implant or in tissue engineering are produced by freeze drying of collagen suspensions. It is extremely important to control the pore structure and producing a homogeneous matrix. However, in industrial processes the results are often heterogeneous.
To help to better understand the process of freeze drying we plan to simulate it to investigate the formation of heterogeneous structures. We will use our code for simulating cracking in suspensions during drying. However, until now we are able to simulate only mono layer or very thin layers of nanoparticulate suspensions in a affordable amount of time.
The aim of this project is to optimize and further parallelize our working code to simulate the dynamics during the drying process of a suspensions. In order to study new processes, in particular the freeze drying processes, we need a huge reduction of the runtime per particle. Therefore we plan to optimize the current code as well as adding MPI parallelization to run our simulations on multiple nodes of modern high performance computer systems.