Conference article

CFD Investigations of Subcooled Nucleate Boiling Flows and Acting Interfacial Forces in Concentric Pipes

Achref Rabhi
Future Energy Center, Mälardalen University, Sweden

Ioanna Aslanidou
Future Energy Center, Mälardalen University, Sweden

Konstantinos Kyprianidis
Future Energy Center, Mälardalen University, Sweden

Rebei Bel Fdhila
Future Energy Center, Mälardalen University, Sweden and Hitachi ABB Power Grids, Sweden

Download articlehttps://doi.org/10.3384/ecp20176385

Published in: Proceedings of The 61st SIMS Conference on Simulation and Modelling SIMS 2020, September 22-24, Virtual Conference, Finland

Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings 176:55, p. 385-392

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Published: 2021-03-03

ISBN: 978-91-7929-731-2

ISSN: 1650-3686 (print), 1650-3740 (online)

Abstract

Boiling ?ows are widely encountered in several engineering and industrial processes. They have a special interest in nuclear industry, where a computational fluid dynamic (CFD) thermohydraulic investigation becomes very popular for design and safety. Many attempts to model numerically subcooled nucleate boiling flows can be found in the literature, where several interfacial forces acting on bubbles which are interacting on the bulk fluid were neglected, due to the hard convergence of the calculations, or to the bad accuracy of the obtained results. In this paper, a sensitivity analysis is carried out for the interfacial forces acting on bubbles during subcooled nucleate boiling flows. For this purpose, 2D CFD axisymmetric simulations based on an Eulerian approach are performed. The developed models aim to mimic the subcooled nucleate boiling flows in concentric pipes, operating at high pressure. The predicted spatial fields of boiling quantities of interest are presented and commented. The numerical results are compared against the available experimental data, where it is shown that neglecting some interfacial forces like the lift or the wall lubrication forces will yield to good predictions for some quantities but will fail the prediction for others. The models leading to the best predictions are highlighted and proposed as recommendations for future CFD simulations of subcooled nucleate boiling flows.

Keywords

subcooled nucleate boiling flows, computational fluid dynamics, interfacial forces, sensitivity analysis

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