COMPARISON BETWEEN EULERIAN AND VOF MODELS FOR TWO-PHASE FLOW ASSESSMENT IN VERTICAL PIPES

The appropriate characterization of the two-phase flow has been recently considered as a topic of interest at industrial level. The Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is one of the techniques used for this analysis. Commonly, the Volume Of Fluid (VOF) model and the Eulerian model are used to model the two-phase flow. The mathematical formulations of these models cause differences in their convergence, computational time and accuracy. This article describes the differences between these two models for applications in the two-phase upward-flow. In order to accomplish this objective, the CFD models were validated with experimental results. This study modeled six experiments with an orthogonal (butterfly) grid. As a result, the Eulerian model shows mean square errors (13.86%) lower than the VOF model (19.04%) for low void fraction flows (<0.25). Furthermore, it was demonstrated that Eulerian model performance is independent from grid, spending less computational time than the VOF model. Finally, it was determined that only the VOF model predicts the pattern flow.