MASc Graduate Seminar - Mustakim

Mechanical Engineering 

Graduate Seminar

CANDIDATE: Ashraf Mustakim

DEGREE SOUGHT: MASc

DATE: 2/13/2026

TIME: 10:30am

PLACE: Room 1102 CEI

Abstract

Carbon black is an industrially important nanomaterial widely used as a reinforcing filler in rubber products, particularly tires, as well as in pigments, coatings, and conductive applications. It is a product of complex interactions between turbulent flow, chemical kinetics, heat transfer, radiation, and particle dynamics that govern its yield and quality. Accurately modeling carbon black formation therefore represents a high-fidelity multiphysics challenge that is often computationally prohibitive. In this work, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) framework is developed to investigate carbon black synthesis in an industrial-style reactor using ANSYS Fluent. The study focuses on evaluating the performance and limitations of different combustion modeling approaches—finite-rate chemistry, eddy dissipation, and turbulence–chemistry interaction models—when coupled with a reduced chemical mechanism. The starting point is to couple the combustion models with a systematically reduced KAUST mechanism to improve computational feasibility while retaining key combustion behavior. The reactor model includes continuous-phase injections of natural gas and hot air, discrete-phase injections of atomized hydrocarbon feedstocks as carbon black precursors, and downstream water injection for rapid quenching. Turbulence is modeled using the k–ω SST model. At the same time, radiative heat transfer is captured using the Discrete Ordinates model coupled with the weighted sum of gray gases approach to account for participating gas radiation. Ongoing work focuses on developing an improved reduced chemical mechanism derived from the full KAUST model that preserves dominant PAH growth pathways, realistic heat-release behavior, and radiative losses, while maintaining significantly lower stiffness and computational cost. This approach aims to enable accurate and efficient prediction of carbon black formation in industrial reactors.