Study of turbulent wavy annular flow inside a 3.4 mm diameter vertical channel by using the Volume of Fluid method in OpenFOAM

Abstract

In annular downward flow, an annular liquid film flows at the perimeter of the channel pushed down by the gravity force and by the shear stress that the vapor core exerts on it. Depending on the working conditions, the vapor-liquid interface can be flat or rippled by waves. The knowledge of the liquid film thickness is very important for the study of annular flow condensation because the thermal resistance of the liquid is often the most important parameter controlling the heat transfer. A new approach for the simulation of annular flow is here proposed using an in-house developed transient solver based on the Volume of Fluid (VOF) adiabatic solver interIsoFoam available in OpenFOAM. With the VOF method, in addition to the standard set of equations (continuity and momentum), a transport equation related to the advection of the volume fraction scalar field has to be solved. The numerical setup consists of 2D axisymmetric domain. An adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) method is added to the solver to better capture the interface position. The k-ω SST model is used for turbulence modelling in both the liquid and vapor phases and a source term (whose magnitude is controlled by a model parameter named B) is included in the ω equation to damp the turbulence at the interface.