Hi all, I am trying to model 2 phase flows (evaporation, boiling) in porous structures using Fluent4.5. I want to account for capillary effects as well. If anybidy has experience in solving similar problems using Fluent please respond.

Thanks, Madhavan

FLUENT offers the possibility to model the pressure losses of a mono phase flow field in a porous media by means of a Darcy-Type model. This model doesn't consider the physical presence of the porous media, therefore it will be difficult to model capillary effects.

I think it should be possible to model this in Fluent 4.5 using user defined subroutines. How to go about it depends on what you want.

Do you want to model the flow and physics is a single pore or the flow in a porous media in which you considr the different phases as continuums and model their "averaged" behaviour, including inter-phase mass transfer, in some way??

Ultimately you need to define your mathematical equations first and then see what source terms you will need to add to the existing Fluent equations. The Fluent 4.5 UDS feature is very flexible so, as long as you can define your equations its likely that you can implement them in Fluent. Have a look at volume 4 of the 4.4 manuals in particular.

If you need to you can even solve additional scalar transport equations.

Greg