Abstract
During CFD simulations of the flows at low Mach number regime, the classical assumption which neglects the dilatable effect of gas is no longer applicable when the temperature variation or the concentration variation of the mixture's components is too large in the fluid domain. To be able to correctly predict the flow at such a regime, some authors have recourse to a Low Mach number algorithm. This algorithm is based on the well-known pressure-based algorithm or elliptic solver for incompressible flows, SIMPLE, with a modification for the treatment of the pressure which is split into two parts (the hydrodynamic pressure and the thermodynamic pressure) and a dilatable term added in the mass equation. This algorithm has been implemented in the CFD code, Code_Saturne, developed by EDF R&D, and applied for the CFD simulations of the erosion phenomena of light gas stratification by air injection. This paper is devoted to the analytical work with the Low Mach number algorithm based on the ST1 series of the SETH-2 campaign provided by the OECD project on the PANDA test facility of PSI. The first part is focused on a mesh sensitivity analysis, which is a common procedure for CFD codes validation. The second part of the paper presents a comparison between the CFD results obtained with the standard algorithms used for incompressible flows and the Low Mach number algorithm. The third part is an analysis of the CFD results obtained on the reference mesh with both different Froude numbers corresponding to the tests ST1_7 (F_r=6.04) and ST1_10 (F_r=7.95) from the ST1 series. In the last part the authors perform the knowledge of the initial light gas distribution effect on the stratification erosion and the capability of the CFD codes to predict this phenomenon with an area governed by diffusion regime (at the top of the vessel) and another one by forced convection near the injection.
