New method in modelling complex interfaces for bubbly flows.

Bubbly flows are common to everyday life and have applications in the biomedical, chemical and nuclear industries. The phenomenon of bubbly flows occurs in the bubble-column-reactors that drive many industrial chemical processes. In the nuclear industry, gas-liquid two-phase flows are of interest from a nuclear safety perspective where bubble-nucleation and bubble flow dynamics can affect the heat-transfer efficiency of a coolant system. The behaviour of bubbly flows is complex and hard to predict. Two phases, gas and liquid, each with its own velocity field and interacting through an evolving interface makes for a highly complex physical system. As the cost of experimental investigation outstrips the cost of computational simulations, much has been done to improve the algorithms used to simulate two phase flows in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). In computational fluid dynamics, the stationary flow domain, say a vertical pipe, is modelled as hundreds upon thousands of smaller volumes. Each smaller controlvolume is attributed or solved for averaged values of temperature, pressure, density, viscosity and flow velocity (mass flux). Together, these many control volumes describe the flow pattern of the entire system. The difficulty in modelling bubbly flows using CFD is that the interface moves through these small control volumes, deforms from the effects of surface tension and interacts with the gas and liquid velocity fields. To correctly capture these effects a high-quality interface tracking method is needed. Imagine a control volume in the shape of a cube. Then imagine if a curved surface of a sphere were to cut through the cube. Where the surface intersects the cubes edge you would get cell-edge intersection points. (see fig 1) If we were to join these cell edge intersection points directly, we would attain a surface that is a model of the curved surface. In fact, if we tried to cut a cube by orientating an intersecting plane at different angles, we would attain polygon shapes between 3 to 6 sides. With a combination of these polygonal surfaces, any 3D surface maybe modelled. Since the modelled interface is composed of polygons that are defined by a combination of celledge intersection markers, the method has been named the InterSection Marker (ISM) method for interface tracking. However, each polygonal interface within a control volume must be further subdivided into smaller triangles. The reason is that the surface must be deformable yet remain planar so that its volume underneath can be quickly calculated. Only a triangle, when exposed to a twisting velocity field, will always recover a flat surface. As a result, the four-sided polygon in figure 1a has been discretised further into triangles, allowing the curvature and area of the surface to be modelled to a higher degree of accuracy. Calculation of the cells fraction-of-volume (VOF - ie. the volume of gas as a fraction of the total volume) is simply achieved by summing the volumes of triangular columns beneath the surface.

Figure 1b shows an array of locally defined VOF values of a sphere, suitably organised for a finite-volume method of solution for CFD. Advection of the interface is achieved by mapping the triangular elements within each cell at time 't0' to new cells at time 't1'. New cell-edge intersections between advected triangles and the t1 cells are calculated and the composite advected interfaces within each 't1' cell are locally re-meshed by an algorithm which preserves the volume underneath the advected composite interface. Central to the ISM method is the tightly coupled manner in which information is passed between the stationary control volumes and moving bubble mesh. This was designed for the purpose of retaining the volume conservation characteristic of the VOF method whilst avoiding the problem of interface diffusion associated with the VOF method.

Raised Centroid

Cell Face Conservation Pts

Cell Edge

intersection marker Fig. 1a: A detailed view of a 4-sided polygon subdivided into smaller triangular elements. Fig. 1b: ISM model of a sphere, 12 cell-units in diameter. Contours represent each cells VOF where: dark VOF of 0, light VOF of 1.