Fractional-Step in Time for Dispersed Multiphase Flows
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Dispersed Multiphase Flows (MPF) have a wide range of applications in mixtures of liquids and gases. In the Euler-Euler approach, each phase has a volume fraction and a velocity, while pressure is common. This model best captures the independent dynamics of each component, but entails a higher complexity. It has been traditionally numerically approximated with Finite Volumes, while Stabilized Finite Elements [1] have also been successfully applied. Nevertheless, the computational cost of the monolithic system solving is very high, due to the non-linearity, the number of degrees of freedom and the ill-conditioning. In order to overcome this issue, a Fractional-Step in time scheme based on volume fraction segregation and pressure correction is proposed. A reformulation of the standard MPF equations, where the summatory of volume fractions equal to one condition is imposed in the mass conservation of each of the phases, enhances total mass conservation. The first step is to compute the volume fractions using extrapolations of velocities. Secondly, the intermediate velocity of each phase is solved iteratively using the precomputed volume fraction and a pressure extrapolation. Then, the pressure which ensures mass conservation is computed from a Poisson-like equation. Finally, the velocities are updated. Several numerical tests, including manufactured solutions, 2D benchmark cases and 3D examples, demonstrate that the algorithm exhibits optimal convergence up to second order in time while the splitting provides significant computational savings. REFERENCES [1] H. Gravenkamp, R. Codina, and J. Principe, “A stabilized finite element method for modeling dispersed multiphase flows using orthogonal subgrid scales,” Journal of Computational Physics, vol. 501, 3 2024.
