Numerical study of heat transfer in two-phase flows

Abstract

Heat transfer in multiphase flow plays an important role in nature and in numerous industries such as petrochemical, automotive, food processing, ocean engineering etc. It is becoming increasingly crucial to design more efficient industrial systems to reduce the environmental impact of industrial activities because of global warming and growing awareness about sustainability. To design these efficient systems it is important to thoroughly understand the details of heat transfer in multiphase flow.

This thesis follows the method of Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) to provide a detailed physical insight of the fluid motion and heat transfer in the model. To accurately model the two phase flow the Coupled Level Set Volume Of Fluid (CLSVOF) method is used. The main advantage of using the CLSVOF method is that it can accurately capture the interface geometry and it has excellent volume conservation capability. The work presented here is an extension to an in-house code developed at TU Delft for Direct Numerical Simulation of two-phase flows using the CLSVOF method. The existing code has been thoroughly validated for the fluid and interface motion but the validation of the heat transfer model remains an unaccomplished task till now. Therefore, the main objective of this thesis is to validate the heat transfer model and then to study the heat transfer in droplets coalescence using this model.

The validation of the heat transfer model was accomplished by calculating the Nusselt number distribution over a bubble surface and comparing it to the available literature. Both the model results and the information from the literature showed very good agreement with each other. After completing the model validation, this model was used to study the heat transfer phenomenon between two coalescing droplets and the surrounding fluid. The results of the droplets coalescence are as per the expectations and are discussed in detail in this thesis. In the process of doing these analyses different ways of calculating the local Nusselt number and the global Nusselt number have been discussed. The validation of the heat transfer model and the analysis done for the case of coalescing droplets paves the way for conducting more complex heat transfer analysis in two-phase flows using this model.