Comparative Simulations of Free Surface Flows Using VOF-Methods and a New Approach for Multi-Scale Interfacial Structures

Abstract

This paper presents free surface flow simulations using different VOF-like interface capturing methods. Both the interFoam solver available in OpenFOAM and the Free Surface Model implemented in ANSYS CFX are applied for the collapse of a water column hitting an obstacle. The computational results of these established methods are compared to a new multi-field concept which is developed for flow situations with multi-scale interfacial structures. The new concept extends the inhomogeneous MUltiple SIze Group (MUSIG)-Model for polydispersed flows by adding a large-scale continuous gas phase. It represents the largest gas structures whose filtered gas-liquid interfaces are captured within the computational domain. Adequate interfacial transfer formulations are introduced for area density and drag and allow the use of different closure models depending on the local morphology. By including appropriate models for the mass transfer, transitions between dispersed and continuous gas morphologies can be described. Thus not only gas-liquid interfaces for large gas structures are detected, but also smallscale bubbles that are entrained under the free surface can be described properly taking into account coalescence- and breakup processes. The concept further improves free surface simulations by including sub-grid information about small waves and instabilities at the free surface. Therefore a new treatment of turbulent kinetic energy is applied via source terms at the free surface. The application of this concept to the dambreak-case with an obstacle demonstrates the breakup of a continuous gas phase and the appearance of polydispersed gas. The collapse of the water column is accompanied by trapping of gas which breaks up to smaller structures. The quality of interface detection during the