About the Book
Particleboards are an essential element in any construction process, from furniture to skyscrapers. The basic production process of particleboards requires the proper mixture of wood particles with adhesive. This thesis presents modelling and simulation of the mixing process for better understanding of the movement of wood particles and adhesive droplets. As classical particle approaches fail, the author chose a clever combination of random walk processes on a lattice gas cellular automata. The thesis first prepares all mathematical modelling formalism for random walk and lattice gas cellular automata and defines a proper combination for the mixing processes. The model gets parametrized with the dimensions of a laboratory mixer, mapping 3D-movement on cylindrical sections. The author develops a proper implementation for simulation in MATLAB. The results of the simulation, e.g. the distribution of the adhesive across the wood particles coincide well with experimental measurements. The thesis is the very successful first step for modelling in this mesoscopic application area.
About the Author
Carina Rößler studied Technical Mathematics at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien). Already in her bachelor curriculum she got involved in modelling and simulation, and she joined the ARGESIM group, where she attended summer schools on simulation technique and where she helped in organizing conferences on modelling and simulation. At master level, she put emphasis on mixed macroscopic and microscopic modelling techniques, and on numerical techniques in simulation, yielding to a master thesis on regularisation methods for DAE systems. Then she got a PhD research position at Wood K plus, the Kompetenzzentrum Holz GmbH. She specialised in the area of particleboards – resulting in a PhD thesis on modelling and simulation of the mixing of wood particles with adhesive, for improving the quality of high-quality particleboards. Her broad knowledge on modelling resulted in the position of a senior specialist for IT business analysis at ÖBB Produktion GmbH.