Artificial Intelligence

The performance of a catalyst support — whether alumina or zeolite — depends on the properties of its porous microstructure: porosity, specific surface area, and the connectivity of the solid network, which govern the access of reactants to active sites. Designing an optimal support thus amounts to solving an inverse problem, i.e., identifying the microstructure, and then the manufacturing parameters, that satisfy a set of property specifications.

One of the main challenges in computational fluid dynamics is to accurately represent physical phenomena at various scales of time and space. Furthermore, exact numerical resolution at every scale is very cost-intensive in terms of computation time. Obtaining reliable solutions therefore requires simulations performed on a coarse scale but using models capable of describing the effects of physics at a very fine scale.