Numerical Simulation of Interface Movement in Gas-Liquid Two-Phase Flows with Level Set Method

Numerical simulation of gas-liquid two-phase flow and heat transfer has been an attractive work for a quite long time, but still remains as a knotty difficulty due to the inherent complexities of the gas-liquid two-phase flow resulted from the existence of moving interfaces with topology changes. This paper reports the effort and the latest advances that have been made by the author and his colaborators, with special emphasis on the methods for computing solutions to the advection equation of the Level set function, which is utilized to capture the moving interfaces in gas-liquid two-phase flows. Three different schemes, i.e. the simple finite difference scheme, the Superbee-TVD scheme and the 5-order WENO scheme in combination with the Runge-Kutta method are respectively applied to solve the advection equation of the Level Set. A numerical procedure based on the well-verified SIMPLER method is employed to numerically calculate the momentum equations of the two-phase flow. The above–mentioned three schemes are employed to simulate the movement of four typical interfaces under 5 typical flowing conditions. Analysis of the numerical results shows that the 5-order WENO scheme and the Superbee-TVD scheme are much better than the simple finite difference scheme, and the 5-order WENO scheme is the best to compute solutions to the advection equation of the Level Set. The 5-order WENO scheme will be employed as the main scheme to get solutions to the advection equations of the Level Set when gas-liquid two-phase flows are numerically studied in the future.