Remedy for ill-posedness and mass conservation error of 1D incompressible two-fluid model with artificial viscosities

Abstract

The two-fluid model is widely used to describe two-phase flows in complex systems such as nuclear reactors. Although the two-phase flow was successfully simulated, the standard two-fluid model suffers from an ill-posed nature. There are several remedies for the ill-posedness of the one-dimensional (1D) two-fluid model; among those, artificial viscosity is the focus of this study. Some previous works added artificial diffusion terms to both mass and momentum equations to render the two-fluid model well-posed and demonstrated that this method provided a numerically converging model. However, they did not consider mass conservation, which is crucial for analyzing a closed reactor system. In fact, the total mass is not conserved in the previous models. This study improves the artificial viscosity model such that the 1D incompressible two-fluid model is well-posed, and the total mass is conserved. The water faucet and Kelvin-Helmholtz instability flows were simulated to test the effect of the proposed artificial viscosity model. The results indicate that the proposed artificial viscosity model effectively remedies the ill-posedness of the two-fluid model while maintaining a negligible total mass error.