variavel0=<b>Paulo Laranjeira da Cunha Lage</b> - paulo@peq.coppe.ufrj.br Programa de Engenharia Quimica
<b>Luiz Fernando L. SILVA</b> - tfd_nando@starmedia.com Programa de Engenharia Quimica, COPPE/UFRJ
<b>Carlos Eduardo Fontes</b> - carlos@peq.coppe.ufrj.br Programa de Engenharia Quimica
<b>Abstract.</b> One of the most challenging problems in several industries is the correct simulation of mold filling. The modeling and simulation of mold filling must include a method to capture the interface formed between the inlet fluid and the fluid that was initially in the mold. A commonly used front-capturing method in an Eulerian mesh is the volume-of-fluid (VOF) method. Due to the hyperbolic nature of VOF advection equation, its solution usually suffers from numerical diffusion and/or dispersion and high-order numerical schemes have to be employed in the discretization of the convective terms, such as the TVD (Total Variation Diminishing) schemes with dimensional splitting. The present contribution explores the usage of RCM (Random Choice Method) for the solution of the VOF color-function equation during mold filling with recirculating flows. It was shown that it is able to generate a solution without numerical diffusion of the front position. The Navier-Stokes equations in rectangular cavities have been solved by a finitevolume method using the SIMPLER algorithm, without considering surface tension effects at the interface. Filling simulations using the TVD and RCM methods are compared. The RCM was able to generate diffusion-free results, sharply defining the interface, even when topological changes (generation of droplets) occur due to the recirculating flow. However, due to its statistical characteristic, front behavior may vary between different simulation runs for the same problem, leading to an uncertainty in front position. This was numerically shown to be equivalent to a numerical diffusion for a 1-D problem.
<b>Keywords.</b> Interface capturing, Mold filling, RCM, TVD schemes, VOF schemes.