Multi-Scale Physics

Welcome to the Department of Multi-Scale Physics.

The Department of Multi-Scale Physics (MSP) is dealing with Industrial and Environmental Processes in the world around us. With a staff of 14 professors and some 35 postdocs and PhD students, MSP aims at a better understanding, a better description and - in industry - a better control of these processes. We think mankind should produce products and energy in a cleaner, more sustainable and more efficient way. MSP wishes to contribute to more sustainable industrial processes and a more sustainable earth.

MSP considers flow and transport phenomena over a wide range of time and length scales in their mutual dependence. We study the interaction of molecular transport of heat and mass, chemical reactions, turbulent eddies, bubbles, drops and particles, and flow and convective transport at the scale of the vessel or at a long range. Usually, we use continuum concepts for describing these phenomena and processes, sometimes (under rarefied conditions) molecular models.
To this end, MSP exploits a wide variety of advanced computational and experimental tools

Highlight of a MSP research example:

Clean heat a hot topic

Modifying burners to flameless combustion can drastically reduce the emissions of industrial furnaces. Research is ongoing, while industry cautiously innovates.

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Imagine a steel cube, the size of a housing block, filled up with burners spewing six meter long flames along steel pipes filled with chemicals that need to be heated up. Or think of the steel furnaces where thick slabs of steel roll through a hall, waiting to be reheated by a 100-megawatt fire before moving on to the next processing step. When prof.dr Dirk Roekaerts (multi-scale physics, Applied Sciences talks about furnaces, he has huge installations in mind. Perhaps equally large is the challenge that he and his colleagues face: to make these furnaces more environmentally friendly by reducing the emissions (of NOx especially) and to increase their efficiency.
read more about this article published in "Delta"