Numerical Study on Evaporation of Spherical Droplets Impinging on the Wall Using Volume of Fluid (VOF) Model 2017-01-0852

This paper aims to extend the existing Volume of Fluid (VOF) model by implementing an evaporation sub-model in an open source Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software, OpenFOAM. The paper applies the new model to numerically study the evaporation of spherical n-heptane droplets impinging on a hot wall at atmospheric pressure and a temperature above the Leidenfrost temperature. Volume of Fluid (VOF) method is chosen to track the liquid gas interface and the capability of VOF method implemented in interDyMFoam solver of OpenFOAM to simulate hydrodynamics during droplet-droplet interaction and droplet-film interaction is explored. Firstly, the in-built solver is used to simulate problems in isothermal conditions and the simulation results are compared qualitatively with the published results to validate the solver. A numerical method for modeling heat and mass transfer during evaporation is implemented in conjunction with the VOF. An additional vapor phase is introduced apart from the liquid and gas phases to understand the mixing and diffusion of vapor and gas phases. The evaporation model is validated quantitatively and qualitatively with fundamental problems having analytical solutions and published results. The effect of mesh dependency was studied with meshes of three different levels of refinement. The effect of droplet number and arrangement on evaporation in film boiling regime is finally studied by three cases including Case 1 (single droplet), Case 2 (2 droplets) and Case 3 (4 droplets) impinging on hot wall at a fixed temperature and a constant non-dimensional distance between droplets. Droplet lift and spread, surface temperature, heat transfer, and evaporation rate are examined.