Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Analysis of Mocoffee’s Single-Serve Coffee Capsule System

• Autor(a) principal: Cunha, Mónica Patrícia Rodrigues da
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/25380
• topic: CFD; Coffee extraction; Espresso Coffee; Mocoffee; Model validation; Solidworks; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Engenharia Química

The aim of this work was to apply computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis to Mocoffee’s single-serve coffee capsule system in order to predict the hydrodynamics of water inside the extraction chamber, as well as to determine the impact of certain model parameters and design features on the fluid flow and, consequently, on the efficiency of the extraction. The geometries of the extraction chamber of the coffee machine were built using the software Solidworks 2016, while the computational mesh and 3D numeric calculations were done using the software Ansys Fluent 16.0. The experimental data used to validate the CFD model was obtained through a set of extractions of different coffee blends, all of them performed in a custom made machine that replicated the very same extraction process as seen in a Mocoffee patented espresso machine (Bossa). Different turbulence models and near-wall treatments were tested to capture the significant features of the fluid flow, such as mixing and the formation of eddies in the more unstable regions of the domain. The CFD results and measured data from the experiments were compared, with a reasonable agreement found with the experimental data for pressure and mass flow rate, but only for a coffee bed resistance that was higher than its predicted theoretical value.