Evaluate shock capturing capability with the numerical methods in OpenFOAM

Abstract

Simulations for both multiphase flows and supersonic single phased flows are well known, however the combination is a less investigated area of research, as the two basic approaches of computational fluid dynamics, the pressure and the density based approach, each describe one of the phases in a better way than the other one. In this paper, we systematically investigate the solver quality of the open source computational fluid dynamics code OpenFOAM in handling transonic flow phenomena that typically occur inside the breaking chamber of high voltage circuit breakers, during contact separation. The solver quality is then compared with that of chosen commercial computational fluid dynamics tools. The main advantage of OpenFOAM is that, contrary to most of the commercial simulation tools, it is license fee free and allows access to the source code. This means that complicated multi physics phenomena inside the arcing chamber can be directly modeled into the code by users, which opens an opportunity to remove limitations of commercial computational fluid dynamics tools. Particularly, the shock capturing capability of OpenFOAM will be evaluated for the transonic internal flow which typically occurs in high voltage circuit breakers. Overall, OpenFOAM shows acceptable shock capturing capabilities in the performed verification and validation studies, with the solver quality comparable to some of the tested commercial computational fluid dynamics tools. There is still room for further solver quality improvements in OpenFOAM by implementing better shock capturing schemes such as a density-based flux-difference-splitting scheme or by writing better physical modeling of the shock/boundary layer interaction into the open architecture of OpenFOAM.

The interaction of parallel and inclined planar rarefied sonic plumes—From free molecular to continuum regime

“…The classical Sod's shock tube test is driven by a pressure ratio of 10, for which most of the compressible solvers mentioned hereafter produced reasonable to accurate results. 65,66 However, the tremendous pressure ratio due to the vacuum exacerbates the problem so that the shock is not captured accurately anymore. To verify the solver for the case of interacting jets, we adapted the shock tube test case to a pressure ratio of 5 Â 10 5 , which is an extreme version of the simulated cases.…”

Numerical method for interfacial heat transfer in an oil‐water displacement flow

“…The property parameters in the unsteady term, convective term, and diffusion term are , , and k , respectively. They could be weighted by algebraic scheme 17‐20 or harmonic scheme 19,20 where A represents or k in Equation (11). The subscripts 1, 2 represent phase 1 and phase 2, respectively.…”

“…In VOF, there are mainly two kinds of weighting forms of property parameters, that is, the algebraic scheme and harmonic scheme. Those schemes have been common in VOF literature: Agarwal et al 17 and Shen et al 18 have used the algebraic scheme for all the property parameters in VOF to perform their research, Khodadadi et al 19 and Ma et al 20 have used harmonic scheme for specific heat and algebraic scheme for other property parameters in VOF to conduct the investigations. However, complete research on the weighting forms for all the property parameters is still not done.…”

A Computational Fluid Dynamic Investigation of Inhomogeneous Hydrogen Flame Acceleration and Transition to Detonation

“…The central schemes which are developed by Kurganov and Tadmor [8]; Kurganov et al [9] and Greenshields et al [13] are available in OpenFOAM as “rhoCentralFoam” [4, 8]. Khodadadi and Malekbala, [14] carried out shock capturing study using different OpenFOAM solvers to solve the sod’s problem [11] and concluded that rhoCentralFoam can provide reasonably accurate shock capturing. They also mentioned that the proposed density-based solution could generate some oscillations in the contact surface of shock.…”