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Numerical Modelling of van der Waals Fluids

Many problems in fluid mechanics and material sciences deal with liquid-vapour flows. In these flows, the ideal gas assumption is not accurate and the van der Waals equation of state is usually used. This equation of state is non-convex and causes the solution domain to have two hyperbolic regions separated by an elliptic region. Therefore, the governing equations of these flows have a mixed elliptic-hyperbolic nature.
Numerical oscillations usually appear with standard finite-difference space discretization schemes, and they persist when the order of accuracy of the semi-discrete scheme is increased. In this study, we propose to use a Chebyshev pseudospectral method for solving the governing equations. A comparison of the results of this method with very high-order (up to tenth-order accurate) finite difference schemes is presented, which shows that the proposed method leads to a lower level of numerical oscillations than other high-order finite difference schemes, and also does not exhibit fast-traveling packages of short waves which are usually observed in high-order finite difference methods. The proposed method can thus successfully capture various complex regimes of waves and phase transitions in both elliptic and hyperbolic regimes

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/22661
Date January 2012
CreatorsOdeyemi, Tinuade A.
ContributorsMohammadian, Majid, Seidou, Ousmane
PublisherUniversité d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa
Source SetsUniversité d’Ottawa
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis

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