CFD study of Jet Impingement Test erosion using Ansys Fluent® and OpenFOAM®

The initial aim of this study was to compare OpenFoam and Ansys Fluent in order to verify OpenFoam’s Lagrangian Library and erosion capabilities. However, it was found that previous versions of Fluent have been providing wrong results for the discrete phase and the differences with the latest version (Ansys Fluent 15) are shown. A Submerged Jet Impingement Test is an effective method for studying erosion created by solid particles entrained in a liquid. When considering low particle concentrations a Lagrangian modeling of the particulate phase is a reasonable approach. Proper linkage between OpenFOAM’s Lagrangian library and the solver pimpleFoam for incompressible transient flows allows two-phase simulations to be undertaken for comparison with Ansys Fluent with the aim of verifying OpenFoam’s accuracy. Steady state convergence for the fluid flow is first accomplished and the results are compared, confirming a good agreement between the two packages. A transient simulation was then set up and spherical particles incorporated into the fluid flow. An assessment of the two codes’ discrete phase models was carried out, focusing on the differences between impact angles and velocities yielded at the impingement plate’s surface employing a similar strategy to that outlined first by Hattori et al [1] and later by Gnanavelu et al. in [2, 3]. In the comparison of OpenFoam with the latest version of Fluent, the main differences between the injection models are highlighted and the coupling possibilities between phases are taken into consideration. Agreement between trends for both impact angles and velocities is satisfactory when the last version of the commercial package is considered and the average discrepancy between numeric values is very low, verifying OpenFoam’s Lagrangian library. Two different Jet Impingement Test configurations are also compared and the differences highlighted.