Validation of the openFOAM VOF solver for condensation in vertical tube and evaporation with conjugate heat transfer in horizontal serpentine tube

This paper presents simulations based on the VOF method under the OpenFOAM package for a rising/condensation bubble in a vertical channel and subcooled boiling flow in a horizontal serpentine tube, with Lee’s model to account for phase change phenomena. The main objective of this study was to test the OpenFOAM solver icoReactingMultiphaseInterFoam for condensation and evaporation phenomena using Lee’s model. In addition, conjugate heat transfer, largely neglected by the OpenFOAM community, was considered in the second configuration of interest by adopting the modeling approach of the baffle3Dregion library and implementing it in the solver to examine its reliability for phase-change flow situations. With an average relative error of 13.4%, the numerical heat transfer coefficient for the rising/condensation bubble showed good agreement with the Ranz and Marshall correlation, which is widely used in the Eulerian-Eulerian simulations. For the second configuration, the time-averaged outlet volume fraction results of the test case 2 and 3 showed good agreement with numerical study of the literature (Yang et al., 2008.), with mean relative errors of 1.9% and 11.2%, respectively. However, for Case 1, the relative difference was higher, reaching a value of 34%, probably due to the difference in mesh size between the two studies at the tube outlet. Additionally, similar flow patterns were observed for all test cases.