Simulation of hydrodynamics of the jet impingement using Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian formulation
Creators: name: Maghzian, Hamid
Publisher: name: University of British Columbia
Year: 2008

description: Controlled cooling is an important part of steel production industry that affects the properties of the outcome steel. Many of the researches done in controlled cooling are experimental. Due to progress in the numerical techniques and high cost of experimental works in this field the numerical work seems more feasible. Heat transfer analysis is the necessary element of successful controlled cooling and ultimately achievement of novel properties in steel. Heat transfer on the surface of the plate normally contains different regimes such as film boiling, nucleate boiling, transition boiling and radiation heat transfer. This makes the analysis more complicated. In order to perform the heat transfer analysis often empirical correlations are being used. In these correlations the velocity and pressure within the fluid domain is involved. Therefore in order to obtain a better understanding of heat transfer process, study of hydrodynamics of the fluid becomes necessary. Circular jet due to its high efficiency has been used vastly in the industry. Although some experimental studies of round jet arrays have been done, yet the characteristics of a single jet with industrial geometric and flow parameters on the surface of a flat plate is not fully understood. Study of hydrodynamics of the jet impingement is the first step to achieve better understanding of heat transfer process. Finite element method as a popular numerical method has been used vastly to simulate different domains. Traditional approaches of finite element method, Lagrangian and Eulerian, each has its own benefits and drawbacks. Lagrangian approach has been used widely in solid domains and Eulerian approach has been widely used in fluid fields. Jet impingement problem, due to its unknown free surface and the change in the boundary, falls in the category of special problems and none of the traditional approaches is suitable for this application. The Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian (ALE) formulation has emerged as a technique that can alleviate many of the shortcomings of the traditional Lagrangian and Eulerian formulations in handling these types of problems. Using the ALE formulation the computational grid need not adhere to the material (Lagrangian) nor be fixed in space (Eulerian) but can be moved arbitrarily. Two distinct techniques are being used to implement the ALE formulation, namely the operator split approach and the fully coupled approach. This thesis presents a fully coupled ALE formulation for the simulation of flow field. ALE form of Navier-Stokes equations are derived from the basic principles of continuum mechanics and conservation laws in the fluid. These formulations are then converted in to ALE finite element equations for the fluid flow. The axi-symmetric form of these equations are then derived in order to be used for jet impingement application. In the ALE Formulation as the mesh or the computational grid can move independent of the material and space, an additional set of unknowns representing mesh movement appears in the equations. Prescribing a mesh motion scheme in order to define these unknowns is problem-dependent and has not been yet generalized for all applications. After investigating different methods, the Winslow method is chosen for jet impingement application. This method is based on adding a specific set of partial differential Equations(Laplace equations) to the existing equations in order to obtain enough equations for the unknowns. Then these set of PDEs are converted to finite element equations and derived in axi-symmetric form to be used in jet impingement application. These equations together with the field equations are then applied to jet impingement problem. Due to the number of equations and nonlinearity of the field equations the solution of the problem faces some challenges in terms of convergence characteristics and modeling strategies. Some suggestions are made to deal with these challenges and convergence problems. Finally the numerical treatment and results of analyzing hydrodynamics of the Jet Impingement is presented. The work in this thesis is confined to the numerical simulation of the jet impingement and the specifications of an industrial test setup only have been used in order to obtain the parameters of the numerical model.