Kinetic boundary condition in vapor–liquid two-phase system during unsteady net evaporation/condensation

Abstract

Heat and mass transfer caused by nonequilibrium phase change (net evaporation/condensation) play a major role in a vapor–liquid two-phase flow. In general, liquid temperature changes with time because of the heat and mass transfer between the vapor and liquid phases; however, a precise investigation of the transport phenomena related to this temporal evolution of liquid temperature is still lacking. The aim of this study is to examine a kinetic boundary condition, which depends on liquid temperature, for the Boltzmann equation in a vapor–liquid two-phase system with unsteady net evaporation/condensation. In this study, we confirmed whether the kinetic boundary condition follows the temporal evolution of liquid temperature attributed to unsteady net evaporation/condensation by using the molecular simulation based on mean-field kinetic theory, and then we validated the accuracy of the kinetic boundary condition by solving the initial boundary value problem of the Boltzmann equation in unsteady net evaporation/condensation. These results showed that the kinetic boundary condition follows the temporal evolution of liquid temperature in the simulation setting of this study. Furthermore, we concluded that the kinetic boundary condition that depends on liquid temperature is guaranteed to be accurate even in unsteady net evaporation/condensation by considering the temporal evolution of liquid temperature.