Designing a carbon absorber

About the customer

Sunlux Technovations, based in Bengaluru, India, specializes in solutions for industrial automation, aerospace and defense. At the forefront of innovation, Sunlux designs smart sensors and controllers that deliver exceptional performance. Their mission is to create intelligent solutions to foster industrial automation, no matter the industry or application, and their products excel in sensing, control and integration – ensuring reliability and efficiency, even in the harshest industry environments.

Their challenge

Sunlux wanted to design a carbon absorber: a device or material used to capture carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the air and industrial emissions and store it for later use.

When designing their carbon absorber, one of Sunlux’s most significant challenges was understanding airflow and thermal distribution across the absorber’s operational modes. The system comprises over 300 components, including heat exchangers, three-way valves, fins, fan blades, heaters, absorbers and more. As such, developing a finite element (FE) model for the entire system, capturing all its features and analyzing transient conditions proved
to be complex and computationally intensive.

To solve their design challenges, Sunlux used an array of tools within Siemens Digital Industries Software’s Simcenter™ software, spanning computational fluid dynamics (CFD), thermal and structural analysis tools. Simcenter is part of the Siemens Xcelerator business platform of software, hardware and services.

Temperature contour for absorption mode configuration.

Our solution

The carbon absorber unit operates in three distinct modes during each cycle – absorption, regeneration and cooling – with a full cycle lasting five hours. The primary objective of Sunlux’s simulation was to analyze these modes and evaluate the system’s thermal and flow characteristics.

The simulation process encompassed geometry preparation, surface meshing, volume meshing and setting up the flow physics using Simcenter Hypermesh™ software. The team also used Simcenter Acusolve™ software to investigate thermal distribution under both steady-state and transient conditions. To minimize simulation time, the team also utilized high-performance computing (HPC) to maximize each solver’s parallelization capabilities. Overall, this allowed Sunlux to thoroughly analyze thermal and flow behavior at various locations inside the absorber. The analysis included velocity contours and vectors, pressure contours and temperature distribution across air and chilled water volumes.

“We partnered with Messen Labs, a leading engineering solutions provider, and leveraged Siemens’ cutting-edge design, simulation and data analytics software,” says Ram Kerur, chief executive officer (CEO) and director at Sunlux. “This collaboration has significantly improved our product development efficiency, enabling us to simulate complex product physics and drive innovation in our offerings.”

Temperature distribution inside the absorber column.

Results

Simcenter proved to be comprehensive and accurate, boasting an accuracy of over 90 percent compared to test data. This approach also minimized the need for physical prototypes and ensured a first time right design. Thanks to Siemens technology, Sunlux developed a robust design early in the process, minimizing design iterations and significantly reducing time-to-market.

“Siemens’ simulation technology enabled us to launch our products faster and more efficiently,” says Kerur.