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ISSN Online: 2379-1748

ISBN Flash Drive: 978-1-56700-517-2

5-6th Thermal and Fluids Engineering Conference (TFEC)
May, 26–28, 2021 , Virtual

AUTOMATED EXTRACTION OF FREE-SURFACE AND ESTIMATION OF AIR ENTRAINMENT USING OPENFOAM

Get access (open in a dialog) pages 159-168
DOI: 10.1615/TFEC2021.cmd.036703

Abstract

In multi-phase computational fluid dynamic simulations, there exist many techniques to extract the interface cells and spatial locations. These techniques do not differentiate between free-surface locations and other phase-boundaries (e.g. bubbles or drops). Extraction of free-surface spatial locations is required in many multi-phase phenomena. However, air entrainment processes occur only at the free-surface. Flow and geometrical parameters at free-surface locations are required to estimate and predict the amount of air-entrained. In this work, we develop an algorithm to extract the free-surface spatial locations and corresponding flow parameters, estimated the local free-surface and the amount of gas holdup at each time step. This algorithm is used to extend the multi-phase solver in OpenFOAM CFD to estimate the amount of air entrained at each time step automatically. We compare the proposed method with a manually estimated volume fraction of air below the free-surface from the image generated in ParaView. We show that the results of the proposed method match with that of the manually estimated volume fraction.
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