Simulation of droplet spreading on micro-CT reconstructed 3D real porous media using the volume-of-fluid method

Mahmoud Aboukhedr, Nicholas Mitroglou, Anastasios Georgoulas, Marco Marengo, Konstantina Vogiatzaki

Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceeding with ISSN or ISBNConference contribution with ISSN or ISBNpeer-review

Abstract

Droplet impact on porous media has a broad range of applications such as material processing, drug delivery and ink injection etc. The simulation studies of such processes are rather limited. To represent the spreading and absorption process of the droplet on porous materials, robust numerical schemes capable of accurately representing wettability as well as capillary effects need to be established. The current work, presents one of the first studies of droplet impact on a real porous media geometry model extracted from a micro-CT scan. The process involves processing of CT image and subsequent threshold based on the structures segmentation. The porous geometry is extracted in the form of a STL (STereoLithography) model, which, with the aid of dedicated software like ANSA and SnappyHexMesh, is converted to an unstructured mesh for successful discretization of the flow domain. The solution algorithm is developed within the open source CFD toolbox OpenFOAM. The numerical framework to track the droplet interface during the impact and the absorption phases is based on previous work. The volume-of-fluid (VOF) method is used to capture the location of the interface, combined with additional sharpening and smoothing algorithms to minimise spurious velocities developed at the capillary dominated part of the phenomenon (droplet recession and penetration). A systematic variation of the main factors that affect this process are considered, i.e. wettability, porous size, impact velocity. To investigate the influence of porous structures on droplet spreading, the average porosity of the media is varied between 18.5% and 23.3% . From these numerical experiments, we can conclude that the droplet imbibition mainly depends on the porous wettability and secondly that the recoiling phase can be observed in the hydrophobic case but not in the hydrophilic case.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings 28th European Conference on Liquid Atomization and Spray Systems (ILASS) 2017
Place of PublicationValencia, Spain
PublisherILASS
Pages1-8
Number of pages8
ISBN (Print)9788490485804
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 10 Sept 2017
Event28th European Conference on Liquid Atomization and Spray Systems (ILASS) 2017 - Valencia, Spain
Duration: 6 Sept 20178 Sept 2017

Conference

Conference28th European Conference on Liquid Atomization and Spray Systems (ILASS) 2017
Country/TerritorySpain
CityValencia
Period6/09/178/09/17

Bibliographical note

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).

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