2025/01/16 by Phil Namesnik, Namesnik, Phil, Alexander Eifert +7
Engineering · Mathematics · #Electrohydrodynamics and Fluid Dynamics #FOS: Physical sciences #Fluid Dynamics (physics.flu-dyn) #Gas Dynamics and Kinetic Theory #Innovative Microfluidic and Catalytic Techniques Innovation
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2501.09337
openalex publication_date 2025/01/16 · openalex created_date 2025/01/18 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Long liquid retention times in industrial gaps, due to capillary effects, significantly affect product lifetime by facilitating corrosion on solid surfaces. Concentration-driven evaporation plays a major role in mitigating this corrosion. Accurate evaporation rate predictions are crucial for improved product design. However, simulating capillary-driven flows with evaporation in complex geometries is challenging, requiring consideration of surface tension, wetting, and phase-change effects. Traditional approaches, such as the Volume-of-Fluid method, are prone to curvature calculation errors and have long simulation times due to strict time step limitations. This study introduces a novel semi-transient simulation approach for fast evaporation rate prediction in arbitrarily shaped cavities. The approach involves a unidirectional coupling circuit, simulating the fluid surface in Surface Evolver and combining it with a vapor-in-gas diffusion simulation in OpenFOAM. The approach assumes that the evaporation rate is calculated solely based on the conditions at a given liquid filling level, without considering the evaporation history. This allows for highly parallelized simulations, achieving simulation runtimes in the order of 10 min to cover up to 150 h of physical time. Numerical investigations are conducted for water evaporation in air at a temperature of 23°C and a relative humidity of 17%, for round and polygonal-shaped capillaries with inner diameters ranging from 1 mm to 13 mm. The results are validated using experimental data and show strong agreement. Simulations are also performed for complex industrial relevant gaps, demonstrating the applicability of the approach to a wide range of crevice geometries.