Two‐phase flow modelling in gas‐stirred liquid vessels with SUPG‐stabilized equal‐order interpolations

Published in Int. J. Numer. Meth. Fluids. Vol. 9 (1), pp. 1-22, 1994
doi: 10.1002/fld.1650190103

Abstract

The modelling of liquid flow in gas‐stirred vessels is described. A simple two‐phase model accounts for the buoyancy effect of bubbles. Friction between liquid and gas is modelled with the hypothesis of independent bubbles. The resulting PDE system is discretized with an original version of the SUPG‐FEM technique which stabilizes both the convection term and equal‐order interpolations for velocity and pressure, which are known to be unstable for incompressible flows. The resulting steady state discrete system is solved via pseudotemporal explicit iteration with a local time step and a preconditioning to homogenize the temporal scales for liquid and gas.