Research Initiation Award: A Boltzmann Model for Multi-Scale and Multi-Physics/Chemistry Transport Phenomena in Porous Media

研究启动奖为传统黑人学院和大学（HBCUs）的初级和中期职业教师提供支持，他们正在建立新的研究项目或重新指导和重建现有项目。期望该奖项有助于提高教师的研究能力和效率，改善所在机构的研究和教学，并使本科生参与研究经验。该奖项授予田纳西州立大学（TSU），促进了一些最具挑战性的流体输送问题的革命性模拟模型的发展，这些问题在许多科学和工程领域普遍存在，因此对技术，环境，健康和经济具有巨大的潜在影响。该项目还致力于通过独特的指导计划，让本科生参与科学、技术、工程和数学（STEM）领域的研究。此外，该项目通过融合数学、编程和工程，促进托大和其他hbcu本科生的科学计算教育，以提高他们的数学和编程素养，这对他们从事STEM职业至关重要。本课题研究的是一个具有挑战性的问题，即一种特殊类型的流体输运现象，具有多尺度、多孔介质、多物理/多化学三个独特特征。一个代表性的问题是电解质在氧化还原液流电池多孔电极中的传输，这是一个案例研究，用于对开发的模拟模型进行基准测试，并展示其潜力。本项目的目标是基于有限体积法求解玻尔兹曼方程的新方法，开发具有高性能计算能力的专用仿真模型，该方法可以方便地采用完全非结构化网格来精确重建多孔介质呈现的复杂三维边界。该项目的新颖之处在于，它提供了一个专门定制的模拟模型，与现有的多孔介质中多尺度、多物理场/多化学场流体输运现象的方法相比，该模型在计算性能（定义为通过相关计算成本标准化的精度）方面具有优势。这个新模型可以加速对所选研究问题的理解。随着进一步的发展，它可以成为除流体输运之外的任何输运现象建模的通用仿真工具。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Research Initiation Awards provide support for junior and mid-career faculty at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) who are building new research programs or redirecting and rebuilding existing programs. It is expected that the award helps to further the faculty member's research capability and effectiveness, improves research and teaching at the home institution, and involves undergraduate students in research experiences. The award to Tennessee State University (TSU) facilitates the development of a revolutionary simulation model for some of the most challenging fluid transport problems that are ubiquitous in many scientific and engineering fields, and, therefore, has tremendous potential impacts on technology, the environment, health, and economy. This project is also dedicated to the involvement of undergraduate students in the research in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields with a unique mentoring plan. In addition, this project promotes the education on scientific computing for undergraduate students at TSU and other HBCUs by merging math, coding, and engineering, in order to improve their math and coding literacy which is essential for them to pursue a STEM career.This project focuses on a challenging research problem, which is a special type of fluid transport phenomena, characterized by three unique features: multi-scale, porous media, and multi-physics/multi-chemistry. A representative problem is the transport of electrolytes in the porous electrodes of redox flow batteries, which is utilized as a case study to benchmark the developed simulation model as well as to demonstrate its potential. The goal of this project is to develop a specialized simulation model with the high-performance computing capability based on a new methodology that solves the Boltzmann equation with the finite volume method, which allows a convenient adoption of fully unstructured grids to precisely reconstruct the complex three-dimensional boundaries rendered by porous media. The novelty of this project is that it provides a specifically tailored simulation model that demonstrates a superiority in computational performance (defined as accuracy normalized by associated computational cost) over existing methodologies for the multi-scale and multi-physics/multi-chemistry fluid transport phenomena in porous media. This new model can accelerate the understanding of the selected research problem. With further development, it can become a general simulation tool for the modeling of any transport phenomenon beyond fluid transport.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.