MENU

You are here

A multiphase model suitable for the numerical simulation of ice-production in water

Speaker: 
Dr Vanessa Covello
Institution: 
Politecnico di Milano
Schedule: 
Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - 14:00
Location: 
A-133
Abstract: 

It is well known that ice production is a complex phenomenon, that greatly affects the geophysical, biological and convective processes occurring in the oceans and sea. Moreover, the presence of ice particles in rivers could produce serious damages to hydroelectric facilities, such as the blocking of turbine intakes, or the blockage of hydroelectric reservoirs. Up to now the mathematical and numerical models for the simulation of ice formationhave been mainly focused on the small ice-concentration regimes, according to the Boussinesq approximation. In this talk we present a multiphase model able to describe all the stages of ice production, overcoming the limitation of the Boussinesq approximation. The model is able to reproduce the interaction phenomena occurring between phases in large ice-concentration regimes, by means of a sophisticated modelling approach, typically adopted for the numerical simulation of multiphase flow of industrial interest. The mixture ice-seawater has been considered as a dense compressible fluid, the behaviour of the liquid phase is indeed modelled by means of an equation of state that links water density to temperature, salinity and pressure. The multiphase equation have been discretized using the finite volume method, and the development of the multiphase solver by means of the OpenFOAM tool is currently ongoing.

Sign in