Wetting simulation of the porous structure of a heat pipe using an eXtended Discontinuous Galerkin Method and a Parameterized Level-Set

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel, efficient level-set representation method for high-order simulations of two-phase flows in porous structures, improving stability and accuracy in modeling heat pipe wettability.

Contribution

It proposes a global analytical level-set approach combined with the eXtended Discontinuous Galerkin method, enhancing stability and computational efficiency in simulating complex interfacial flows.

Findings

The method accurately captures capillary rise dynamics.

It enables larger time steps in high-order simulations.

Validation shows agreement with established data.

Abstract

We perform high-order simulations of two-phase flows in capillaries, with and without evaporation. Since a sharp-interface model is used, singularities can arise at the three-phase contact line, where the fluid-fluid interface interacts with the capillary wall. These singularities are especially challenging when a highly accurate, high-order method with very little numerical diffusion is used for the flow solver. In this work, we employ the eXtended Discontinuous Galerkin (XDG) method, which has a very high accuracy but a severe limit regarding e.g., the time-step restriction. To address this challenge and enhance the stability of our numerical method we introduce a novel approach for representing a moving interface in the case of two-phase flows. We propose a global analytical representation of the interface-describing level-set field, defined by a small set of time-dependent parameters. Noteworthy for its simplicity and efficiency, this method effectively addresses the inherent complexity of two-phase flow problems. Furthermore, it significantly improves numerical stability and enables the use of larger time steps, ensuring both reliability and computational efficiency in our simulations. We compare different analytic expressions for level-set representation, including the elliptic function and the fourth-order polynomial, and validate the method against established literature data for capillary rise, both with and without evaporation. These results highlight the effectiveness of our approach in resolving complex interfacial dynamics.