Parallel, Adaptive Grid Computing of Multiphase Flows in Spacecraft Fuel Tanks

‡A parallel adaptive Eulerian-Lagrangian method is developed for effective large scale multiphase flow computation. The intricate complexity of parallelism for the EulerianLagrangian method is discussed and spatial domain decomposition strategies are proposed. An efficient communication approach is presented with MPI standard communication and the performance of the parallel Eulerian-Lagrangian method is evaluated. The speedup on problems having million of cells shows super-linear behavior due to the effect of cache hit rate, and the parallel efficiency peaks at the trade-off point of the cache hit rate and the computation-to-communication ratio. A first-principle-based phase change model is introduced by computing the rate of phase change in each phase as well as across liquid/vapor interface. The self-pressurization in a liquid hydrogen fuel tank is simulated and it is shown that the phase change in a liquid phase has a dominant contribution comparing phase change on the liquid/vapor surface, and the rate decreases as saturation temperature increases. The effects of heat flux amount and liquid fuel fill-level are investigated, and the pressurization accelerates showing longer transition period with higher pressure rise rate as heat flux and fill level increases.

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