An aircraft may experience inlight ice accretion and corresponding reductions in performance and control when the vehicle encounters clouds of super-cooled water droplets. The EADS-IW Surface Engineering Group is investigating passive anti-icing possibilities, such as functional and ice phobic coatings. Ice-resistant coatings require investigating droplet impact on dry surfaces and wet films, including microscopic effects such as droplet splashing. To investigate droplet impacts, a volume of fluid (VOF) flow solver was used for droplets impacting dry and wetted hydrophobic and superhydrophobic surfaces, focusing on meso-scale simulations. The effects of structured, micro-scale surface roughness and the effects of a thin wet film on the surface, corresponding to a saturated surface under high humidity conditions, were investigated. Axisymmetric domains produced acceptable results for smooth, dry surfaces. It was determined that in order to properly predict behavior of droplets impacting surfaces with structured micro-scale roughness, three-dimensional simulations are recommended.

Cette thèse porte sur l'étude des ballotements dans les réservoirs de satellites à poste, lors des phases de manoeuvre à faible accélération. En effet la bulle de gaz d'hélium servant à pressuriser le réservoir se met en mouvement, générant ainsi des perturbations sur la stabilité globale du satellite. Afin de mener à bien cette étude, des méthodes numériques ont été développées, avec une méthode de frontières immergées pour prendre en compte les parois du réservoir.Le code est utilise la méthode Level-Set pour capturer l'interface, et gère les sauts à l'aide de la méthode Ghost-Fluid. Un solveur BlackBox Multigrid est également développé pour améliorer lesperformances de calcul. Une étude est présentée dans le dernier chapitre pour définir quelques lois de comportements en fonction des vitesses et accélérations générées lors des manoeuvres. / The core study of this PhD thesis is the sloshing in satellite tanks, during low acceleration maneuvers. Indeed the helium bubble used to pressurize the tank moves, thus generating perturbations on the global stability of the satellite. In order to understand this problem, numerical schemes have been developed, such as an immersed boundary method to model the tank wall. The numerical tool uses a Level-Set function coupled to a Ghost Fluid Method to track the interface and to account for the jump conditions.A BlackBox Multigrid Solver have been developed to improve computational cost. Finally a study is presented in the last chapter to predict the behaviour of the fluids with a varying rotational speed generated during some classical maneuvers.

The most common type of electric propulsion in space exploration is the Hall Effect Thruster (HET), mainly due to its high specific impulse and high thrust to power ratio. However, uncertainties about the thruster's lifetime prediction have prevented widespread integration of HETs. Among these limitations, wall erosion of acceleration channel is of greatest concern. The experimental methods of erosion are time consuming and costly, and they are often limited to one single configuration. Hence, developing a computational model not only decreases the costs but also shortens the design time of a HET. This thesis investigates the feasibility of a uid erosion modelling with a multi-physics software (COMSOL) to further decrease the time and the development cost. First of all, this thesis provides an overview of available plasma modelling techniques and the physics behind the erosion phenomenon. Moreover, the effective parameters and available modules in the multiphysics software as well as their theoretical background were studied and discussed in detail. The Electron Anomalous phenomenon and pressure instability are determined as the main limiting factors for such a model. A non-magnetized model is included to find an optimal value for pressure and to reduce the probability of pressure instability occurrence in magnetized model. To fulfill this task, several simulations for various pressure values (0.005 Torr, 0.05 Torr, and 0.5 Torr) were conducted. Next, the simulation of magnetized/full model has been carried out with addition of magnetic coils in non-magnetized model. To avoid the Electron Anomalous phenomenon, the Bohm diffusion approach was implemented. In addition, a full Particle-In-Cell (PIC) simulation of a typical HET (SPT-100) with the similar input parameters as in fluid model was conducted, and the results were compared and validated using experimental data. The PIC model was intended to be utilized to investigate the accuracy of erosion model in multiphysics software. The results of this thesis indicate that current application of erosion model in COMSOL is not possible whilst high accuracy of the erosion model based on PIC approach can be achieved. Finally, the application of semi-empirical method through direct input of magnetic field data can allow short time simulation of a HET in COMSOL to gain insight about the preliminary behaviour of plasma, however, the simulation of an erosion model requires either a built-in PIC algorithm in COMSOL or a PIC based code.

Dynamic response of materials to high-speed and high-intensity loading conditions is important in several applications including high-speed flows with droplets, bubbles and particles, and hyper-velocity impact and penetration processes. In such high-pressure physics problems, simulations encounter challenges associated with the treatment of material interfaces, particularly when strong nonlinear waves like shock and detonation waves impinge upon them. To simulate such complicated interfacial dynamics problems, a fixed Cartesian grid approach in conjunction with levelset interface tracking is attractive. In this regard, a sharp interface Cartesian grid-based, Ghost Fluid Method (GFM) is developed for resolving embedded fluid, elasto-plastic solid and rigid (solid) objects in hyper-velocity impact and high-intensity shock loaded environment. The embedded boundaries are tracked and represented by virtue of the level set interface tracking technique. The evolving multi-material interface and the flow are coupled by meticulously enforcing the boundary conditions and jump relations at the interface. In addition, a tree-based Local Mesh Refinement scheme is employed to efficiently resolve the desired physics. The framework developed is generic and is applicable to interfaces separating a wide range of materials and for a broad spectrum of speeds of interaction (O(km/s)). The wide repertoire of problems solved in this work demonstrates the flexibility, stability and robustness of the method in accurately capturing the dynamics of the embedded interface. Shocks interacting with large ensembles of particles are also computed.

The problem of real-time simulation of ocean surface waves, ship movement and the coupling in between is tackled, and a number of different methods are covered and discussed. Among these methods, the finite volume method has been implemented in an attempt to solve the problem, along with the compressible Euler equations, an octree based staggered grid which allows for easy adaptive mesh refinement, the volume of fluid method and a variant of the Hyper-C advection scheme for compressible flows for advection of the phase fraction field. The process of implementing the methods that were chosen proved to be tricky in many ways, as they involve a large number of advanced topics, and the implementation that was implemented in this thesis work suffered from numerous issues. There were for example problems with keeping the interface intact, as well as a harsh restriction on the time step size due to the CFL condition. Improvements required to make the method sustainable for real-time applications are discussed, and a few suggestions on alternative approaches that are already in use for similar purposes are also given and discussed. Furthermore, a method for compensating for gain/loss of mass when solving the incompressible flow equations with an inaccurately solved pressure Poisson equation is presented and discussed. A momentum conservative method for transporting the velocity field on staggered grids without introducing unnecessary smearing is also presented and implemented. A simple, physically based illumination model for sea surfaces is derived, discussed and compared to the Blinn–Phong shading model, although it is never implemented. Finally, a two-dimensional partial differential equation in the spatial domain for simulating water surface waves for mildly varying bottom topography is derived and discussed, although it is deemed to be too slow for real-time purposes and is therefore never implemented. / <p>This publication differs from the printed version of the report in the sense that links are blue in this version and black in the printed version.</p>

No description available.

Modelling the ice accretion in glaze regime for the supercooled large droplets is one of the most challenging problems in the aircraft icing field. The difficulties are related to the presence of the liquid water film on the surface in the glaze regime and also the phenomena associated with SLD conditions, specifically the splashing and re-impingement. The steady improvement of simulation methods and the increasing demand for highly optimised aircraft performance, make it worthwhile to try to get beyond the current level of modelling accuracy. A semi-empirical method has been presented to characterize the thin water film in the icing problem based on both analytical and experimental approaches. The experiments have been performed at the Cranfield icing facilities. Imaging techniques have been used to observe and measure the features of the thin water film in the different conditions. A series of numerical simulations based on an inviscid VOF model have been performed to characterize the splashing process for different water film to droplet size ratios and impact angles. Based on these numerical simulations and the proposed methods to estimate the thin water film thickness, a framework has been presented to model the effects of the splashing in the icing simulation. These effects are the lost mass from the water film due to the splashing and the re-impingement of the ejected droplets. Finally, a new framework to study the solidification process of the thin water film has been explored. This framework is based on the lattice Boltzmann method and the preliminary results showed the capabilities of the method to model the dynamics, thermodynamics and the solidification of the thin water film.

Modelling the ice accretion in glaze regime for the supercooled large droplets is one of the most challenging problems in the aircraft icing field. The difficulties are related to the presence of the liquid water film on the surface in the glaze regime and also the phenomena associated with SLD conditions, specifically the splashing and re-impingement. The steady improvement of simulation methods and the increasing demand for highly optimised aircraft performance, make it worthwhile to try to get beyond the current level of modelling accuracy. A semi-empirical method has been presented to characterize the thin water film in the icing problem based on both analytical and experimental approaches. The experiments have been performed at the Cranfield icing facilities. Imaging techniques have been used to observe and measure the features of the thin water film in the different conditions. A series of numerical simulations based on an inviscid VOF model have been performed to characterize the splashing process for different water film to droplet size ratios and impact angles. Based on these numerical simulations and the proposed methods to estimate the thin water film thickness, a framework has been presented to model the effects of the splashing in the icing simulation. These effects are the lost mass from the water film due to the splashing and the re-impingement of the ejected droplets. Finally, a new framework to study the solidification process of the thin water film has been explored. This framework is based on the lattice Boltzmann method and the preliminary results showed the capabilities of the method to model the dynamics, thermodynamics and the solidification of the thin water film.

Liquid jet atomisation has a wide variety of application in areas such as injectors in automobile and launch vehicle combustors, spray painting, ink jet printing etc. Understanding physical mechanisms involved in the primary regime of atomisation in combustors is extremely challenging due to the lack of experimental techniques that can reliably provide measurements of gas and liquid velocity fields in this region. Experimental studies have so far been mostly restricted to conditions at atmospheric conditions rather than technically relevant operating pressures. We present a computational fluid dynamics based modelling approach that can capture the evolution of the flow field in the dense primary atomization region of the spray as part of the present thesis work. A fully compressible 3D flow solver is coupled with an interface tracking solver based on level set method. A generalised mathematical formulation for thermodynamic models is implemented in flow solver enabling easy switching between various equations of states. Solvers are parallelised to run on large number of processors and are shown to have good scalability. A modification to the level set method which greatly reduces mass conservation inaccuracies when compared with existing state-of-art baseline schemes has been developed during this work. The Ghost uid Method is used for applying matching conditions at the Interface. The liquid and gas phases are modelled using the perfect gas and Tait equations of state respectively. Several validation studies have been carried out to ensure quantitative accuracy of the solver implemented. Results from canonical Rayleigh Taylor instability simulations shows good agreement with reported results in literature. Finally, results for unsteady evolution of a water-air jet at a liquid to gas density ratio of 10 are shown. Physical mechanisms causing the initial droplet formation are discussed in detail. Droplet feedback is identified as one of the important mechanisms in triggering liquid core instabilities. Comparisons between droplet size distributions obtained from computations are carried out. Vorticity dynamics is used to understand hole and ligament formation from liquid core. Effect of numerical droplets on the simulation results is also looked at in detail.

A coupled solution approach is presented for numerically simulating a near-field underwater explosion (UNDEX). An UNDEX consists of a complicated sequence of events over a wide range of time scales. Due to the complex physics, separate simulations for near/far-field and early/late-time are common in practice. This work focuses on near-field early-time UNDEX simulations. Using the assumption of compressible, inviscid and adiabatic flow, the fluid flow is governed by a set of Euler fluid equations. In practical simulations, we often encounter computational difficulties that include large displacements, shocks, multi-fluid flows with cavitation, spurious waves reflecting from boundaries and fluid-structure coupling. Existing methods and codes are not able to simultaneously consider all of these characteristics. A robust numerical method that is capable of treating large displacements, capturing shocks, handling two-fluid flows with cavitation, imposing non-reflecting boundary conditions (NRBC) and allowing the movement of fluid grids is required. This method is developed by combining numerical techniques that include a high-order accurate numerical method with a shock capturing scheme, a multi-fluid method to handle explosive gas-water flows and cavitating flows, and an Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian (ALE) deformable fluid mesh. These combined approaches are unique for numerically simulating various near-field UNDEX phenomena within a robust single framework. A review of the literature indicates that a fully coupled methodology with all of these characteristics for near-field UNDEX phenomena has not yet been developed. A set of governing equations in the ALE description is discretized by a Runge Kutta Discontinuous Galerkin (RKDG) method. For multi-fluid flows, a Direct Ghost Fluid (DGF) Method coupled with the Level Set (LS) interface method is incorporated in the RKDG framework. The combination of RKDG and DGF methods (RKDG-DGF) is the main contribution of this work which improves the quality and stability of near-field UNDEX flow simulations. Unlike other methods, this method is simpler to apply for various UNDEX applications and easier to extend to multi-dimensions. / Ph. D.