varRhoTurbVOF: a new set of volume of fluid solvers for turbulent isothermal multiphase flows in OpenFOAM

Abstract

The volume of fluid (VOF) method is a popular approach for multiphase flow modeling. The open-source computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software, OpenFOAM, implements a variety of VOF-based solvers and provides users a wide range of turbulence models. Since isothermal multiphase flows under the VOF framework belong to the variable-density incompressible flow category, the isothermal VOF-based solvers in OpenFOAM fail to use the correct turbulence models. varRhoTurbVOF is designed to solve this issue and with the hope to replace all the corresponding existing solvers in the future. With the object-oriented paradigm, varRhoTurbVOF guarantees the usability, reusability and maintainability of the codes. Aside from turbulence modeling, all other features in the original solvers are preserved in varRhoTurbVOF.Comment: This is the accepted manuscript of the corresponding journal articl