A Proposed Approach for Accurate Estimation of Interface Surface Area in Multiphase Simulations

Multiphase simulations and computational methods with precisely quantified interfaces are important for variety of engineering applications. A few of these applications are: heat transfer utilizing boiling processes, optimizing combustion, and additive printing/deposition processes. In these applications, calculating the length of the interface between two phases (e.g. a vapor and liquid) is particularly critical. Errors in the calculation of the size of the interface propagate over subsequent time steps thereby producing inaccurate rates of phase-change, fluid velocities, and convection heat transfer. This work proposes a method to reduce the reduce error in interface calculations in multiphase simulations. The proposed method uses the interface inclination and the vapor volume-fraction on each computational cell to compute the interface surface area. Moreover, this work provides details on proper declaration and computation of mass transfer with the Volume-of-Fluid sharp interface tracking algorithm. The performance of the proposed approach is compared with the accepted method that estimates interface surface area with gradients of vapor volume fractions. Computer simulations of spherical bubble growth in superheated liquid demonstrate the relevance of the proposed approach. Results indicate that the errors with the accepted method could propagate to 20% (relative to the theoretical estimation) in the prediction of bubble growth rate and fluid velocities. The proposed approach leads to errors of less than 1% in the prediction of bubble growth rate and fluid velocities.