Waterfall CFD Simulation Using Two-Phase Flow

Description

Introduction

Flow separation from a surface or separation of two-phase flows (natural waterfall) is one of the most important issues in fluid mechanics. Flow separation due to the specific shape of the geometry or flow can have positive or negative effects on its surroundings. Therefore, it has always been tried to control this phenomenon as much as possible and to investigate the possible effects and consequences.

Project Description

In this project, the separation of laminar fluid flow from a surface which is easily seen in a natural waterfall is investigated and analyzed. This separation occurs only due to gravity and the difference in height between the two surfaces. Water enters the fluid domain with a mass flow of 20 Kg/s and falls when the lower bed is finished, converting into a waterfall. K-epsilon and implicit VOF models are activated to analyze this flow.

waterfall Geometry & Mesh

The geometry and the mesh for this project are created inside Gambit®. The geometry includes a mass-flow inlet, 3 pressure outlets, several symmetry and wall boundary conditions and 9 different partitions.  The mesh type used for this geometry is structured and the element number is 626400.

Waterfall CFD Simulation Settings

The key assumptions considered in this project are:

• Simulation is done using pressure-based solver.
• The present simulation and its results are considered to be steady and do not change as a function time.
• The effect of gravity has been taken into account and is equal to -9.81 in Y direction.

The applied settings are summarized in the following table.

Results

Contours of pressure, velocity, volume fraction, etc. are presented.

All files, including Geometry, Mesh, Case & Data, are available in Simulation File. By the way, Training File presents how to solve the problem and extract all desired results.