Progress in Phenomenological Modeling of Turbulence Damping around a Two-Phase Interface

• Main Authors: Wenyuan Fan, Henryk Anglart
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2019-07-01
• Series: Fluids
• Subjects: two-phase flow; CFD; phenomenological modeling; turbulence damping; Egorov’s model; asymmetric treatment
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2311-5521/4/3/136

The presence of a moving interface in two-phase flows challenges the accurate computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling, especially when the flow is turbulent. For such flows, single-phase-based turbulence models are usually used for the turbulence modeling together with certain modifications including the turbulence damping around the interface. Due to the insufficient understanding of the damping mechanism, the phenomenological modeling approach is always used. Egorov’s model is the most widely-used turbulence damping model due to its simple formulation and implementation. However, the original Egorov model suffers from the mesh size dependency issue and uses a questionable symmetric treatment for both liquid and gas phases. By introducing more physics, this paper introduces a new length scale for Egorov’s model, making it independent of mesh sizes in the tangential direction of the interface. An asymmetric treatment is also developed, which leads to more physical predictions for both the turbulent kinetic energy and the velocity field.