The Group has a long-standing collaboration with a leading multinational company with a strong regional presence for the design of household appliances. The aim of this line of research is to improve both the energy efficiency and the user experience of these appliances through analysis based on robust fluid dynamical principles. Both energy efficiency and user experience play a major role in making products more appealing in a highly competitive context.
This line of research addresses the development of computational models for investigating potential improvements in an array of household appliances.
For gas cooktop burners, we develop simplified models of both the thermochemical processes occurring during gas combustion as well as their application to domestic gas cooktop burners. Gas fuels used in these domestic cooktops are, generally, natural gas, propane and butane. Gas combustion occurs through complex thermochemical systems involving tens (natural gas) to hundreds (butane) of chemical species and hundreds (natural gas) to thousands (butane) of reactions between them. In order to use these appliances within multidimensional computational models, the complexity of the chemical system must be reduced down to 20-30 species while retaining the main characteristics of the original systems (such as adiabatic flame temperature, ignition delay and laminar flame speed).
The line of research for induction cooktops addresses the processes of liquid heat-up and boiling. The goal is to develop Reduced Order Models of flow and heat transfer within the cooking vessel in order to generate “Digital Twins” of the cooking process that can be embeded in the appliance controls and deliver an improved cooking experience to the user.
In washer-dryers, we are investigating the fluid dynamic processes involved in the clothes drying in order to facilitate the design of more energy efficient washers-dryers. The main challenge is the complex geometry of the air circuit, which includes: the wet clothes, the drum and tub of the washer-dryer, a heat pump for humidity condensation and process air heating, air filters and a fan. Since there exists a wide array of processes and scales, we address the problem through ad-hoc models for each component. For example, we are developing 0D data-based models and 1D first-principles-based submodels embedded in the model of the whole process.