Eventos Anais de eventos
COBEM 2021
26th International Congress of Mechanical Engineering
Numerical Investigation of metastable condensation of wet steam under high pressure conditions
Submission Author:
Luccas Kavabata , SP , Brazil
Co-Authors:
Luccas Kavabata, ULISSES ADONIS SILVA COSTA, Arthur Cato, Guilherme Pimentel , Jairo Cavalcante , João Victor Nunes Fonseca, Ernani Volpe, João Luiz F. Azevedo, Marcelo Hayashi
Presenter: Luccas Kavabata
doi://10.26678/ABCM.COBEM2021.COB2021-0567
Abstract
Phase change involves complex phenomena and may occur in many engineering applications, such as compressors, low-pressure turbines and supersonic separators. In many of them, phase change is undesirable, since it may cause efficiency loss and service life reduction. However, there are applications where it is essential. Such is the case with the supersonic separator, where phase change is what allows the separation to occur. In fact, the device is designed to condense components of a gaseous mixture, so as to collect them. It accelerates that mixture to a supersonic flow in an isentropic expansion process, which entails the homogeneous meta-stable condensation of some components. Hence,it is of practical importance to investigate and control such phenomena. The task involves modeling nucleation and growth rates for the liquid (dispersed) phase, as well as deriving the equations that govern the evolution of liquid droplets in the gas flow. An attractive approach to that end is the so-called method of moments, which has been the focus of much research activity in recent years. The objective of the present work is to perform a numerical investigation of meta-stable condensing flows, for non-ideal single component gases under high-pressure conditions. The numerical simulations are performed with the branch feature_2phase of the open-source code Stanford University Unstructured (SU2), which has been implemented with an external thermodynamic library by researchers from TU Delft. This library allows for the use of more complex thermodynamic models and equations of state, e.g., RefProp, necessary for the investigation. The study is addressing the comparison of some well-known nucleation rate and growth rate models that are available in the literature for the problem. The work is contributing to the verification of how well these models perform in predicting condensation phenomena under high pressure conditions. The final paper will include the formulation of the models used as well as a thorough discussion of the results obtained in the present investigation.
Keywords
Condensation phenomena, Metastability, Hill’s Method of Moments, High pressure, Non-ideal compressible fluid dynamics
