Title: Evaluation of commercial and academic CFD codes for a two-phase flow benchmark test case

Authors: Johan Shu-Ren Hysing; Stefan Turek

Addresses: Department of Mathematics, Shanghai Jiaotong University, 800 Dongchuan Road, Shanghai 200240, China ' Institute of Applied Mathematics (LS III), TU Dortmund, Vogelpothsweg 87, D-44227 Dortmund, Germany

Abstract: The performance of two commercial simulation codes, Ansys Fluent and Comsol Multiphysics, is thoroughly examined for a recently established two-phase flow benchmark test case. In addition, the commercial codes are directly compared with the newly developed academic code, FeatFlow TP2D. The results from this study show that the commercial codes fail to converge and produce accurate results, and leave much to be desired with respect to direct numerical simulation of flows with free interfaces. The academic code on the other hand was shown to be computationally efficient, produced very accurate results, and outperformed the commercial codes by a magnitude or more.

Keywords: two-phase flow; rising bubble; benchmarking; flow solvers; computational science; computational fluid dynamics; commercial CFD codes; academic CFD codes; direct numerical simulation; mathematical modelling.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCSE.2015.070993

International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering, 2015 Vol.10 No.4, pp.387 - 394

Received: 23 Mar 2012
Accepted: 27 Jul 2012
Published online: 05 Aug 2015 *

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