Modeling and simulation of the bubble-induced flow in wine fermentation vessels

Detailed flow pattern analyses regarding wine fermentations conducted without mechanical agitation are limited to lab-scale investigations, as industrial size measurements are expensive and difficult to realize. Computational fluid dynamic (CFD) methods can offer an alternative and more flexible approach to gain insight into such bubble induced fluid flows. Therefore, the aim of this study was to transfer the findings of existing research onto a CFD model capable of capturing the three-dimensional flow pattern in industrial scale wine fermentation vessels. First results were obtained by using an extended version of the OpenFOAM (R) (v.2.2.x) solver multiphaseEulerFoam for modeling the gas-liquid two phase system. With parameters from the most vigorous phase of wine fermentation a fully developed, unsteady flow regime could be established after approx. 120 s of real time. Thereby the groundwork for further evaluations of e.g. mixing efficiency or cooling equipment optimizations with CFD methods is laid.