A coupled level set and volume of fluid method on unstructured grids for the direct numerical simulations of two-phase flows including phase change

•A CLSVOF method has been developed for unstructured grids for two-phase flows.•Phase change model is incorporated to simulate film boiling on complex geometries.•The present method has been validated qualitatively as well as quantitatively. In the present study, a coupled level set and volume of fl...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inInternational journal of heat and mass transfer Vol. 122; pp. 182 - 203
Main Authors Kumar Singh, Nikhil, Premachandran, B.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Oxford Elsevier Ltd 01.07.2018
Elsevier BV
Subjects
Advection
CLSVOF
Computer simulation
Cylinders
Film boiling
Flat plates
Fluids
Free convection
Level set
Phase change
Phase transitions
Quantitative analysis
Scaling factors
Simulation
TVD schemes
Two phase flow
Unstructured grid
Unstructured grids (mathematics)
Velocity
Volume
Volume of fluid
CLSVOF
Film boiling
Level set
Unstructured grid
Volume of fluid
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Summary:•A CLSVOF method has been developed for unstructured grids for two-phase flows.•Phase change model is incorporated to simulate film boiling on complex geometries.•The present method has been validated qualitatively as well as quantitatively. In the present study, a coupled level set and volume of fluid (CLSVOF) method is developed for two-dimensional unstructured grids to perform direct numerical simulations of two-phase flows including phase change. The volume fraction is advected using a multi-directional advection algorithm, where the flux polygons are constructed using vertex velocities and a scaling factor based on cell face velocities is used to correct the advected volume fraction. The level set field is advected using a total variational diminishing (TVD) scheme and geometrically reinitialized at the end of each time step. The performance of the proposed CLSVOF method is evaluated in detail on unstructured grids, both qualitatively and quantitatively, prior to simulation of phase change problems. A number of advection test cases and two-phase flow problems are considered for this purpose. Results obtained for film boiling over a horizontal flat plate using an unstructured grid show excellent agreement with results available in the literature. The numerical study of natural convection film boiling over a horizontal cylinder at different wall superheats shows a better agreement with semi-empirical correlations compared to other available numerical results.
ISSN:0017-9310
1879-2189
DOI:10.1016/j.ijheatmasstransfer.2018.01.091