Numerical Simulation on the Boiling Flow Patterns of Al2O3-Water Nanofluid in Micro/Minichannel under Different Hypergravity Levels and Directions

Due to the influence of hypergravity that has a significant impact on the performance of heat exchanger in aircraft, which is crucial for electronic equipment on the plane and life safeties of pilots and passengers, a numerical study is conducted using Fluent 20R2 software to investigate boiling flow patterns under different gravity levels and directions. In this study, the thermophysical properties of nanofluids are analyzed, and select the most suitable theoretical model of thermal conductivity, viscosity, and surface tension for present simulations. Choose the grid structure of 122,116 after independence check for grid. The VOF approach is employed for present simulation, and the standard κ − ε turbulence model with nonequilibrium wall function is used. The UDFs for mass and energy source terms and thermophysical properties of nanofluid are developed for calculating the HTC of nanofluid. There are three different gravity directions with gravity levels from 1 g to 9 g. The results show that the flow pattern becomes the stratified flow with the gravity levels increasing when the hypergravity direction is perpendicular to the flow direction, and the HTCs decrease with the increment of gravity levels. The vapor-phase transform to circular when the hypergravity direction is the same as the flow direction, and the HTCs of the second half of the tube are decreasing with the increasing gravity levels. On the contrary, the vapor phase is elongated when the hypergravity direction is opposite to the flow direction, and the HTCs show the enhanced tendency.

A SOLUTION TO STEFAN PROBLEM USING EULERIAN TWO FLUID VOF MODEL

A novel approach for the solution of Stefan problem within the framework of the multi fluid model supplemented with Volume of Fluid (VOF) method, i.e. two-fluid VOF, is presented in this paper. The governing equation set is comprised of mass, momentum and energy conservation equations, written on a per phase basis and supplemented with closure models via the source terms. In our method, the heat and mass transfer is calculated from the heat transfer coefficient, which has a fictitious function and depends on the local cell size and the thermal conductivity, and the implementation is straightforward because of the usage of the local value instead of a global parameter. The interface sharpness is ensured by the application of the geometrical reconstruction scheme implemented in VOF. The model is verified for three types of computational meshes including triangular cells, and good agreement was obtained for the interface position and the temperature field. Although the developed method was validated only for Stefan problem, the application of the method to engineering problems is considered to be straightforward since it is implemented to a commercial CFD code only using a local value; especially in the field of naval hydrodynamics wherein the reduction of ship resistance using boiling flow can be computed efficiently since the method handles phase change processes using low resolution meshes.