OpenFOAM solvers for solid-liquid phase change with adaptive mesh refinement, corresponding to: 'A Finite Volume Parallel Adaptive Mesh Refinement Method for Solid-Liquid Phase Change'

Solid-liquid phase change solvers with adaptive mesh refinement and dynamic load balancing (following Rettenmaier et al [1]). These solvers were developed as part of the journal paper: A Finite Volume Parallel Adaptive Mesh Refinement Method for Solid-Liquid Phase Change. Please refer to this paper when using these solvers.

Requires: OpenFoam-9 and blastfoam (visit the blastfoam GitHub for installation instructions).

This repository contains:

1) cell residual error estimates in src/errorEstimation. The implementation is based on a custom built OpenFOAM v9 port from the original implementation in foamExtend v5. To compile run: wmake libso

2) a single region solid-liquid phase change solver (sl_pimpleFoam) with adaptive mesh refinement (including dynamic load balancing) in applications/solvers/sl_phasechange. To compile: run make

3) a multi region solid-liquid phase change solver (CHT_PhaseChangeFoam) with adaptive mesh refinement (including dynamic load balancing) for each separate region in applications/solvers/sl_phasechange. To compile: run make.

4) A tutorial (to be run with CHT_PhaseChangeFoam), corresponding to stage 4 in a recently published numerical benchmark for modelling phase change in molten salt reactors [2]. This tutorial features a base mesh of 110x300 elements, with 2 levels of refinement based on the refinement criteria (face jump in the liquid fraction, cell residual for the absolute velocity and cell residual for the temperature)

Comments

1) To use the dynamic load balancing boundary condition, the case needs to be initialised with

The following command: addEmptyPatch patchName internal -overwrite

2) For CHT_PhaseChangeFoam, we recommend using globalTemperatureCoupledBC (from the blastFoam project) instead of turbulentCoupledTemperatureBaffleBC for the inter-region interface conditions.

[1] Rettenmaier, D., Deising, D., Ouedraogo, Y., Gjonaj, E., De Gersem, H., Bothe, D., ... & Marschall, H. (2019). Load balanced 2D and 3D adaptive mesh refinement in OpenFOAM. SoftwareX, 10, 100317.

[2] Pater, M., Kaaks, B., Lauritzen, B., & Lathouwers, D. (2023). A numerical benchmark for modelling phase change in molten salt reactors. Annals of Nuclear Energy, 194, 110093.