From Multiscale Modeling To Meso Science

Multiscale modeling is becoming essential for accurate, rapid simulation in science and engineering. This book presents the results of three decades of research on multiscale modeling in process engineering from principles to application, and its generalization for different fields. This book considers the universality of meso-scale phenomena for the first time, and provides insight into the emerging discipline that unifies them, meso-science, as well as new perspectives for virtual process engineering. Multiscale modeling is applied in areas including: multiphase flow and fluid dynamics chemical, biochemical and process engineering mineral processing and metallurgical engineering energy and resources materials science and engineering Jinghai Li is Vice-President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), a professor at the Institute of Process Engineering, CAS, and leader of the EMMS (Energy-minimizing multiscale) Group. Wei Ge, Wei Wang, Ning Yang and Junwu Wang are professors at the EMMS Group, part of the Institute of Process Engineering, CAS. Xinhua Liu, Limin Wang, Xianfeng He and Xiaowei Wang are associate professors at the EMMS Group, part of the Institute of Process Engineering, CAS. Mooson Kwauk is an emeritus director of the Institute of Process Engineering, CAS, and is an advisor to the EMMS Group.

This brief is devoted to providing a complete outline of meso-science by briefing the relevant contents from the published book and by updating evidences and concepts of meso-science. The importance of meso-science in solving various problems in energy, resource, and the environment is introduced. The whole evolutionary development of the EMMS principle is reviewed to show how a simple idea on the customized modeling of particle clustering in gas-solid systems was developed, verified, extended, and finally generalized into the common principle of compromise in competition between dominant mechanisms for all mesoscale phenomena in science and engineering, leading to the proposition of meso-science. More importantly, updates on the concept of meso-science and perspectives are presented, along with new insights and findings from after the publication of the original book. In this way, we hope to help readers more easily familiarize themselves with meso-science, and to trigger interest and attention to this interdisciplinary field. Application areas include: multiphase flow and fluid dynamics chemical, biochemical and process engineering mineral processing and metallurgical engineering energy and resources material science and engineering Jinghai Li is vice president of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), professor at Institute of Process Engineering of CAS. Wenlai Huang is associate professor at Institute of Process Engineering of CAS. This book has been translated into Chinese and published by Science Press, please visit here for the Chinese version: http://www.sciencep.com/s_single.php?id=35751

The idea of the book is to provide a comprehensive overview of computational physics methods and techniques, that are used for materials modeling on different length and time scales. Each chapter first provides an overview of the basic physical principles which are the basis for the numerical and mathematical modeling on the respective length-scale. The book includes the micro-scale, the meso-scale and the macro-scale, and the chapters follow this classification. The book explains in detail many tricks of the trade of some of the most important methods and techniques that are used to simulate materials on the perspective levels of spatial and temporal resolution. Case studies are included to further illustrate some methods or theoretical considerations. Example applications for all techniques are provided, some of which are from the author’s own contributions to some of the research areas. The second edition has been expanded by new sections in computational models on meso/macroscopic scales for ocean and atmosphere dynamics. Numerous applications in environmental physics and geophysics had been added.

Most problems in science involve many scales in time and space. An example is turbulent ?ow where the important large scale quantities of lift and drag of a wing depend on the behavior of the small vortices in the boundarylayer. Another example is chemical reactions with concentrations of the species varying over seconds and hours while the time scale of the oscillations of the chemical bonds is of the order of femtoseconds. A third example from structural mechanics is the stress and strain in a solid beam which is well described by macroscopic equations but at the tip of a crack modeling details on a microscale are needed. A common dif?culty with the simulation of these problems and many others in physics, chemistry and biology is that an attempt to represent all scales will lead to an enormous computational problem with unacceptably long computation times and large memory requirements. On the other hand, if the discretization at a coarse level ignoresthe?nescale informationthenthesolutionwillnotbephysicallymeaningful. The in?uence of the ?ne scales must be incorporated into the model. This volume is the result of a Summer School on Multiscale Modeling and S- ulation in Science held at Boso ¤n, Lidingo ¤ outside Stockholm, Sweden, in June 2007. Sixty PhD students from applied mathematics, the sciences and engineering parti- pated in the summer school.

Most problems in science involve many scales in time and space. An example is turbulent ?ow where the important large scale quantities of lift and drag of a wing depend on the behavior of the small vortices in the boundarylayer. Another example is chemical reactions with concentrations of the species varying over seconds and hours while the time scale of the oscillations of the chemical bonds is of the order of femtoseconds. A third example from structural mechanics is the stress and strain in a solid beam which is well described by macroscopic equations but at the tip of a crack modeling details on a microscale are needed. A common dif?culty with the simulation of these problems and many others in physics, chemistry and biology is that an attempt to represent all scales will lead to an enormous computational problem with unacceptably long computation times and large memory requirements. On the other hand, if the discretization at a coarse level ignoresthe?nescale informationthenthesolutionwillnotbephysicallymeaningful. The in?uence of the ?ne scales must be incorporated into the model. This volume is the result of a Summer School on Multiscale Modeling and S- ulation in Science held at Boso ¤n, Lidingo ¤ outside Stockholm, Sweden, in June 2007. Sixty PhD students from applied mathematics, the sciences and engineering parti- pated in the summer school.

A systematic discussion of the fundamental principles, written by a leading contributor to the field.

The idea of the book is to provide a comprehensive overview of computational physics methods and techniques, that are used for materials modeling on different length and time scales. Each chapter first provides an overview of the physical basic principles which are the basis for the numerical and mathematical modeling on the respective length-scale. The book includes the micro-scale, the meso-scale and the macro-scale. The chapters follow this classification. The book will explain in detail many tricks of the trade of some of the most important methods and techniques that are used to simulate materials on the perspective levels of spatial and temporal resolution. Case studies are occasionally included to further illustrate some methods or theoretical considerations. Example applications for all techniques are provided, some of which are from the author’s own contributions to some of the research areas. Methods are explained, if possible, on the basis of the original publications but also references to standard text books established in the various fields are mentioned.

This book introduces readers to MesoBioNano (MBN) Explorer – a multi-purpose software package designed to model molecular systems at various levels of size and complexity. In addition, it presents a specially designed multi-task toolkit and interface – the MBN Studio – which enables the set-up of input files, controls the simulations, and supports the subsequent visualization and analysis of the results obtained. The book subsequently provides a systematic description of the capabilities of this universal and powerful software package within the framework of computational molecular science, and guides readers through its applications in numerous areas of research in bio- and chemical physics and material science – ranging from the nano- to the mesoscale. MBN Explorer is particularly suited to computing the system’s energy, to optimizing molecular structure, and to exploring the various facets of molecular and random walk dynamics. The package allows the use of a broad variety of interatomic potentials and can, e.g., be configured to select any subset of a molecular system as rigid fragments, whenever a significant reduction in the number of dynamical degrees of freedom is required for computational practicalities. MBN Studio enables users to easily construct initial geometries for the molecular, liquid, crystalline, gaseous and hybrid systems that serve as input for the subsequent simulations of their physical and chemical properties using MBN Explorer. Despite its universality, the computational efficiency of MBN Explorer is comparable to that of other, more specialized software packages, making it a viable multi-purpose alternative for the computational modeling of complex molecular systems. A number of detailed case studies presented in the second part of this book demonstrate MBN Explorer’s usefulness and efficiency in the fields of atomic clusters and nanoparticles, biomolecular systems, nanostructured materials, composite materials and hybrid systems, crystals, liquids and gases, as well as in providing modeling support for novel and emerging technologies. Last but not least, with the release of the 3rd edition of MBN Explorer in spring 2017, a free trial version will be available from the MBN Research Center website (mbnresearch.com).