The dissolution of solids has created spectacular geomorphologies ranging from centimeter-scale cave scallops to the kilometer-scale "stone forests" of China and Madagascar. Mathematically, dissolution processes are modeled by a Stefan problem, which describes how the motion of a phase-separating interface depends on local concentration gradients, coupled to a fluid flow. Simulating these problems is challenging, requiring the evolution of a free interface whose motion depends on the normal derivatives of an external field in an ever-changing domain. Moreover, density differences created in the fluid domain induce self-generated convecting flows that further complicate the numerical study of dissolution processes. In this contribution, we present a numerical method for the simulation of the Stefan problem coupled to a fluid flow. The scheme uses the Immersed Boundary Smooth Extension method to solve the bulk advection-diffusion and fluid equations in the complex, evolving geometry, coupled to a θ-L scheme that provides stable evolution of the boundary. We demonstrate third-order temporal and pointwise spatial convergence of the scheme for the classical Stefan problem, and second-order temporal and pointwise spatial convergence when coupled to flow. Examples of dissolution of solids that result in high-Rayleigh number convection are numerically studied, and qualitatively reproduce the complex morphologies observed in recent experiments.
We develop finite element methods for coupling the steady-state Onsager--Stefan--Maxwell equations to compressible Stokes flow. These equations describe multicomponent flow at low Reynolds number, where a mixture of different chemical species within a common thermodynamic phase is transported by convection and molecular diffusion. Developing a variational formulation for discretizing these equations is challenging: the formulation must balance physical relevance of the variables and boundary data, regularity assumptions, tractability of the analysis, enforcement of thermodynamic constraints, e…
The study investigates the problem of magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) free convection over a non-isothermal axisymmetric body under the action of transverse magnetic field. The body is embedded in a porous medium saturated with electrically conducting non-Newtonian power law fluid. In order to obtain similarity solution, it is assumed that the viscosity of the fluid decays exponentially with temperature. The qualitative results are illustrated for a vertical flat plate, horizontal cylinder and sphere.
A range of optimization cases of two-dimensional Stefan problems, solved using a tracking-type cost-functional, is presented. A level set method is used to capture the interface between the liquid and solid phases and an immersed boundary (cut cell) method coupled with an implicit time-advancement scheme is employed to solve the heat equation. A conservative implicit-explicit scheme is then used for solving the level set transport equation. The resulting numerical framework is validated with respect to existing analytical solutions of the forward Stefan problem. An adjoint-based algorithm is t…
We study numerically the melting of a horizontal layer of a pure solid above a convecting layer of its fluid rotating about the vertical axis. In the rotating regime studied here, with Rayleigh numbers of order $10^7$, convection takes the form of columnar vortices, the number and size of which depend upon the Ekman and Prandtl numbers, as well as the geometry -- periodic or confined. As the Ekman and Rayleigh numbers vary, the number and average area of vortices vary in inverse proportion, becoming thinner and more numerous with decreasing Ekman number. The vortices transport heat to the phas…
A new formulation of the immersed boundary method, which facilitates accurate simulation of incompressible isothermal and natural convection flows around immersed bodies and which may be applied for accurate linear stability analysis of the flows, is presented. The method is based on the fully pressure-velocity coupled approach, implicitly satisfying the divergence-free velocity constraint with no need for an extra projection-correction step, which is a significant advantage for the computational efficiency. The method treats pressure, boundary forces, and heat sources as Lagrange multipliers,…
Melting and, conversely, solidification processes in the presence of convection are key to many geophysical problems. An essential question related to these phenomena concerns the estimation of the (time-evolving) melting rate, which is tightly connected to the turbulent convective dynamics in the bulk of the melt fluid and the heat transfer at the liquid-solid interface. In this work, we consider a convective-melting model, constructed as a generalization of the Rayleigh-Bénard system, accounting for the basal melting of a solid. As the change of phase proceeds, a fluid layer grows at the hea…
An extended immersed boundary method utilizing a semi-implicit direct forcing approach for the simulation of confined incompressible viscous thermal flow problems is presented. The method utilizes a Schur complement approach to enforce the kinematic constraints of no-slip and the corresponding thermal boundary conditions for immersed surfaces. The developed methodology can be straightforwardly adapted to any existing incompressible time marching solver based on a segregated pressure-velocity coupling. The method accurately meets the thermal and the no-slip boundary conditions on the surfaces o…
Analytical and numerical solutions to the three-phase Stefan problem with simultaneous occurrences of melting, solidification, boiling, and condensation phenomena
San Diego State University（圣地亚哥州立大学）；Colorado School of Mines（科罗拉多矿业学院）
We numerically investigate both single and multiple droplet dissolution with droplets consisting of lighter liquid dissolving in a denser host liquid. The significance of buoyancy is quantified by the Rayleigh number Ra which is the buoyancy force over the viscous damping force. In this study, Ra spans almost four decades from 0.1 to 400. We focus on how the mass flux, characterized by the Sherwood number Sh, and the flow morphologies depend on Ra. For single droplet dissolution, we first show the transition of the Sh(Ra) scaling from a constant value to $Sh\sim Ra^{1/4}$, which confirms the e…
In the present study, a discrete forcing Immersed Boundary Method (IBM) is proposed for the numerical simulation of high-speed flow problems including heat exchange. The flow field is governed by the compressible Navier-Stokes equations, which are resolved by using the open source library OpenFOAM. The numerical solver is modified to include source terms in the momentum equation and in the energy equation, which account for the presence of the immersed body. The method is validated on some benchmark test cases dealing with forced convection problems and moving immersed bodies. The results obta…
Thermal convection in fluid layers heated from below are usually realized experimentally as well as treated theoretically with fixed boundaries on which conditions for the temperature and the velocity field are prescribed. The thermal and velocity boundary layers attached to the upper and lower boundaries determine to a large extent the properties of turbulent convection at high Rayleigh numbers. Fixed boundaries are often absent in natural realizations of thermal convection. This paper studies the properties of convection driven by a planar heat source below a cooling source of equal size imm…
In the above paper the author treats the boundary layer flow along a vertical flat plate, immersed in a Darcy Brinkman Forchheimer porous medium. The porosity and the permeability of the porous medium are variable across the boundary layer. In addition a magnetic field with constant strength is applied normal to the plate. The fluid temperature at the plate is constant and different from that of the ambient fluid. This temperature difference creates a buoyancy force and the flow is characterized as mixed convection. The partial differential equations of the boundary layer flow are transformed …
Phase interfaces in melting and solidification processes are strongly affected by the presence of convection in the liquid. One way of modeling their transient evolution is to couple an incompressible flow model to an energy balance in enthalpy formulation. Two strong nonlinearities arise, which account for the viscosity variation between phases and the latent heat of fusion at the phase interface. The resulting coupled system of PDE's can be solved by a single-domain semi-phase-field, variable viscosity, finite element method with monolithic system coupling and global Newton linearization. A …
Enhancing the efficiency of water electrolysis, which can be severely impacted by the nucleation and growth of bubbles, is key in the energy transition. In this combined experimental and numerical study, in-situ bubble evolution and dissolution processes are imaged and compared to numerical simulations employing the immersed boundary method. We find that it is crucial to include solutal driven natural convection in order to represent the experimentally observed bubble behaviour even though such effects have commonly been neglected in modelling efforts so far. We reveal how the convective patte…
The goal of this report is to present the final project conducted in order to fulfill the requirements of the M.Sc. degree at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Ben-Gurion University (BGU) of the Negev. The project comprises theoretical research investigating natural convection compressible flow with high temperature differences and with complex geometries. The research motivation comes from long-term research investigating and simulating the steady state and transient multiphase flow regimes existing in the reactor core, that was established by the Soreq Nuclear Center. The main object…
The present paper is devoted to implementation of the immersed boundary technique into the Fourier pseudo-spectral solution of the vorticity-velocity formulation of the two-dimensional incompressible Navier--Stokes equations. The immersed boundary conditions are implemented via direct modification of the convection and diffusion terms, and therefore, in contrast to many other similar methods, there is not an explicit external forcing function in the present formulation. The desired immersed boundary conditions are approximated on some regular grid points, using different orders (up to second-o…
In our recent work [H. Zhang, F.X. Trias, A. Oliva, D. Yang, Y. Tan, Y. Sheng. PIBM: Particulate immersed boundary method for fluid-particle interaction problems. Powder Technology. 272(2015), 1-13.], a particulate immersed boundary method (PIBM) for simulating fluid-particle multiphase flow was proposed and assessed in both two- and three-dimensional applications. In this study, the PIBM was extended to solve thermal interaction problems between spherical particles and fluid. The Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) was adopted to solve the fluid flow and temperature fields, the PIBM was responsibl…
The immersed boundary method (IBM) of Peskin (J. Comput. Phys., 1977), and derived forms such as the projection method of Taira and Colonius (J. Comput. Phys., 2007), have been useful for simulating flow physics in problems with moving interfaces on stationary grids. However, in their interface treatment, these methods do not distinguish one side from the other, but rather, apply the motion constraint to both sides, and the associated interface force is an inseparable mix of contributions from each side. In this work, we define a discrete Heaviside function, a natural companion to the familiar…
Oscillatory droplet dissolution from competing Marangoni and gravitational flows
University of Twente（特温特大学）；Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering, University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学化学与材料工程系）；Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization（马克斯·普朗克动力学与自组织研究所）
The lifetime $τ$ of an isothermal and purely diffusively dissolving droplet in a host liquid scales as $τ\sim R_0^2$ with its initial radius $R_0$ [Langmuir, Phys. Rev. 12, 368 (1919)]. For a droplet dissolving due to natural convection driven by density differences, its lifetime scales as $τ\sim R_0^{5/4}$ [Dietrich et al., J. Fluid Mech. 794, 45 (2016)]. In this paper we experimentally find and theoretically derive yet another droplet dissolution behavior, resulting in $τ\sim R_0^4$. It occurs when the dissolution dynamics is controlled by local heating of the liquid, leading to a modified s…
We study the secondary time-averaged flow (streaming) generated by an oscillating cylinder immersed within a fluid, under high amplitude forcing so that inertial effects are significant. This streaming is decomposed into a viscous boundary layer flow where vorticity is created, and an outer flow of larger size. We operate under conditions of relatively low viscosity, so that the boundary layer is smaller than the object diameter. While for low Keulegan-Carpenter (KC) number (small enough amplitude), the size of the outer flow is typically that of the object, here we show that at large enough f…
Solute mass transfer from a spherical fluid-filled rigid capsule subjected to shear flow is studied numerically, while considering unsteady, continuous and nonuniform boundary conditions on its surface. Here, the capsule acts as a reservoir with its initially encapsulated solute concentration decaying over time. This scenario differs from the classical case study of either constant concentration or constant mass flux at the surface of the particle. The flow and the concentration field are computed using fully three-dimensional lattice Boltzmann simulations, where the fluid-structure two-way co…
Fluid-structure interaction (FSI) of thin flexible fins coupled with convective heat transfer has applications in energy harvesting and in understanding functioning of several biological systems. We numerically investigate FSI of the thin flexible fins involving large-scale flow-induced deformation as a potential heat transfer enhancement technique. An in-house, strongly-coupled fluid-structure interaction (FSI) solver is employed in which flow and structure solvers are based on sharp-interface immersed boundary and finite element method, respectively. We consider twin flexible fins in a heate…
