3D unified CFD to modeling of bubbles phenomena

Full text of publication follows: During of the last ten years the developed numerical methods and algorithms for solving of heat and mass transfer problems in compressible/incompressible fluids were successfully tested at simulation of interaction of two immiscible liquids. Now these computing tools are extended on a case of two-phase flows, such as a liquids-gas system as follows: outside of bubbles the non-stationary incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in the primitive variables coupled with the heat transfer equation are used; inside of bubble a compressible medium model with low Mach limit is applied. To observe of an interface of liquid-gas system we use the modified level set method and three-dimensional advective schemes of TVD-type with small scheme diffusion with use of sub-grid simulation. These schemes with small diffusion were already applied by us under using of sub-grid simulation for interface transfer in case of two non-mixing liquids. For bubble phenomena a numerical technique based on the developed algorithms with a small scheme diffusion, for which the discrete approximations are constructed using the finite-volume methods and fully staggered grids is adapted. Testing of the developed approach is carried out on the set of test problems and a good agreement is obtained between numerical predictions and experimental data. The numerical technique was successfully utilized for numerical support of 3D experiment financed by Nuclear Energy Agency at the Organization economic cooperation and development within the framework of MASKA Project, where computational fluid dynamics of two non-mixing fluids such as corium and steel was investigated. In this paper there is application of developed approach for simulation of bubble flows, in particular, for study of coalescence of two drops. The developed technique has a high degree of efficiency and allows on a personal computer (3 GHz and 2 Gbytes RAM) to carry out CFD calculations on a grid with 107 nodes. For single-phase flows a possible fast action equals 3 x 10-6 second per node and time step. (author)