Simulations of Crystal Growth Using Lattice Boltzmann Formulation

Crystallization is widely applied in many industrial applications, in particular for chemical engineering and pharmaceutical products. This project will focus on the modeling of crystal growth with a phase-field model using the lattice Boltzmann method. First, simulations of snowflake growth are carried out under different ambient conditions (humidity and temperature) in the plate-growth regime of the Nakaya diagram. The resulting crystal habits show that the phase-field model correctly captures both the crystal shape and the onset of primary and secondary branching instabilities. After that, the growth rate of a single crystal of S-mandelic acid (S-ma) is computed and validated by comparison with experimental results. Finally, the approach is extended to investigate the impact of forced convection on the crystal habits both on the snowflakes and S-ma crystals. Based on there parametric studies, a modification of the reactor geometry is proposed that should reduce the observed deviations from symmetrical growth for the single S-ma crystal.