Volume of fluid method

About: Volume of fluid method is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 5338 publications have been published within this topic receiving 116760 citations.

Numerical Simulation of Laminar Liquid Film Condensation in a Horizontal Circular Minichannel

Abstract: A three-dimensional volume of fluid (VOF) simulation of condensation of R134a inside a 1 mm i.d. minichannel is presented. The minichannel is horizontally oriented and the effect of gravity is taken into account. Simulations have been run both with and without taking into account surface tension. A uniform interface temperature and a uniform wall temperature have been fixed as boundary conditions. The mass flux is G = 100 kg m−2 s−1 and it has been assumed that the flow is laminar inside the liquid phase while turbulence inside the vapor phase has been handled by a modified low Reynolds form of the k–ω model. The fluid is condensed till reaching 0.45 vapor quality. The flow is expected to be annular without the presence of waves, therefore the problem was treated as steady state. Computational results displaying the evolution of vapor–liquid interface and heat transfer coefficient are reported and validated against experimental data. The condensation process is found to be gravity dominated, while the global effect of surface tension is found to be negligible. At inlet, the liquid film is thin and evenly distributed all around the tube circumference. Moving downstream the channel, the film thickness remains almost constant in the upper half of the minichannel, while the film at the bottom of the pipe becomes thicker because the liquid condensed at the top is drained by gravity to the bottom.

Challenges in modeling unstable two‐phase flow experiments in porous micromodels

Abstract: The simulation of unstable invasion patterns in porous media flow is very challenging because small perturbations are amplified, so that slight differences in geometry or initial conditions result in significantly different invasion structures at later times. We present a detailed comparison of pore-scale simulations and experiments for unstable primary drainage in porous micromodels. The porous media consist of Hele-Shaw cells containing cylindrical obstacles. By means of soft lithography, we have constructed two experimental flow cells, with different degrees of heterogeneity in the grain size distribution. As the defending (wetting) fluid is the most viscous, the interface is destabilized by viscous forces, which promote the formation of preferential flow paths in the form of a branched finger structure. We model the experiments by solving the Navier-Stokes equations for mass and momentum conservation in the discretized pore space and employ the Volume of Fluid (VOF) method to track the evolution of the interface. We test different numerical models (a 2D vertical integrated model and a full-3D model) and different initial conditions, studying their impact on the simulated spatial distributions of the fluid phases. To assess the ability of the numerical model to reproduce unstable displacement, we compare several statistical and deterministic indicators. We demonstrate the impact of three main sources of error: i) the uncertainty on the pore space geometry, ii) the fact that the initial phase configuration cannot be known with an arbitrarily small accuracy, and iii) three dimensional effects. Although the unstable nature of the flow regime leads to different invasion structures due to small discrepancies between the experimental setup and the numerical model, a pore-by-pore comparison shows an overall satisfactory match between simulations and experiments. Moreover, all statistical indicators used to characterized the invasion structures are in excellent agreement. This validates the modeling approach, which can be used to complement experimental observations with information about quantities that are difficult or impossible to measure, such as the pressure and velocity fields in the two fluid phases.