Stefanie Rauchenzauner, postdoctoral researcher at Johannes Kepler University Linz, spent a visiting period at the Department of Energy from 6 July to 30 September 2026, working on the project Model development for numerical simulations of bubble columns based on experimental data.
She works on the multi-scale modelling of multi-phase flows, with a focus on the efficient simulation of large-scale processes. After her PhD at Johannes Kepler University she carried out postdoctoral research on porous media flows at the Technical University of Munich, and she now investigates multi-phase turbulence, supported by an Early-Stage Program Fellowship of the Austrian Science Fund.
On 6 July, in the Aula Sole of the EN:lab building, she gave a seminar, Multi-scale modelling of large-scale gas-particle flows. Euler–Euler approaches make the simulation of gas–particle flows affordable by treating both phases as continua, but on a coarse grid the meso-scale structures go unresolved and the interphase exchange terms come out too large. The seminar presented dynamic spatially averaged closure models for those unresolved effects, built on the turbulent kinetic energy of both phases and compared against fine-grid simulations and experimental data, together with the question of how energy is exchanged between correlated and uncorrelated fluctuations in a two-phase flow.
