Numerical Simulation of Subcooled Nucleate Boiling by Coupling Level-Set Method with Moving-Mesh Method

Abstract

A new numerical procedure coupling the level-set method with the moving-mesh method to simulate subcooled nucleate pool boiling is proposed. Numerical test problems have validated this new method. The simulation of bubble dynamics during nucleate boiling under liquid subcooling shows that this novel adaptive method is more accurate in determining interfacial heat transfer than a computational method based on uniform grids with the same number of mesh points.

We are grateful to Gihun Son and Gopinath Warrier for helpful remarks on this work. This work is supported by NASA under the Microgravity Fluid Physics Program. Jianliang Qian is supported by NSF Grant 0542174.