Electronic Thesis/Dissertation
 

A Multiphase Solver for High-Fidelity Phase-Change Simulations over Complex Geometries

Open Access

Complex interactions between solid, liquid and gas occur in many practical engineering applications, and are often difficult to quantify experimentally. A few examples include boiling over solid heaters, solidification melt-dynamics in metal casting, and convective cooling of electronic components. With the availability of scalable computational tools, high-fidelity simulations can provide new insight into these phenomena and answer open questions. In the present work, a multiphase solver is presented which can simulate problems involving phase transition over complex geometries. The dynamics of liquid-gas interface are modeled using a level-set technique, which utilizes Ghost Fluid Method (GFM) to account for sharp jump in pressure, velocity, and temperature across the multiphase boundary. The fluid-solid interactions are modeled using an Immersed Boundary Method (IBM) which uses a Moving Least Squared (MLS) reconstruction to calculate fluid-flow around the solid, along with an additional GFM forcing to model its effect on pressure, temperature and Conjugate Heat Transfer (CHT). The resulting three dimensional solver is fully explicit in time and uses a fractional step method for Navier-Stokes, energy, and mass transfer equations. Validation and verification cases are presented to demonstrate the accuracy of the solver in comparison to experimental and analytical problems, and results of high fidelity pool boiling simulations in varying gravity environments are discussed in detail.

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