A Volume of Fluid Immersed Boundary Method for Industrial Polymer Mixing

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel numerical framework combining VOF and immersed boundary methods within OpenFOAM for simulating complex polymer mixing flows, addressing stability and efficiency challenges.

Contribution

It develops a fully implicit, block-coupled VOF-IB solver that improves stability and reduces computational costs for industrial polymer mixing simulations.

Findings

Physically consistent velocity and pressure predictions in industrial geometries

Enhanced numerical stability allowing larger time steps

Reduced computational cost compared to standard segregated solvers

Abstract

This work develops advanced numerical methods for free-surface simulations of polymer mixing processes, integrating a Volume of Fluid (VOF) interface-capturing approach with a non-conforming Immersed Boundary (IB) method to model two-phase flows of highly viscous polymer melts and air within partially filled rotating mixing devices, implemented within the Finite Volume OpenFOAM library. To overcome severe numerical instabilities arising from the strong viscosity contrast between polymer melts and air, a block-coupled scheme providing fully implicit viscous diffusion treatment is integrated into the VOF-IB framework, relaxing time-step stability constraints and substantially reducing computational cost with respect to standard segregated solvers. The resulting BC-VOF-IB solver is applied to industrially relevant geometries of single- and twin-screw extruders, yielding physically consistent predictions of velocity and pressure fields under partial filling conditions. While further developments, most notably the inclusion of thermal effects, remain necessary, the proposed framework represents a meaningful step toward bridging academic CFD research and the practical demands of industrial polymer processing.