A Volume of Fluid Immersed Boundary Method for Industrial Polymer Mixing
For researchers in computational fluid dynamics and polymer processing, this method advances free-surface simulations of industrial mixing devices, though it remains incremental and requires further development for thermal effects.
This work develops a Volume of Fluid Immersed Boundary method for simulating two-phase flows of polymer melts and air in partially filled rotating mixing devices, integrating a block-coupled scheme to overcome numerical instabilities from viscosity contrast. The method yields physically consistent predictions for single- and twin-screw extruders, reducing computational cost compared to standard solvers.
This work develops advanced numerical methods for free-surface simulations of polymer mixing processes, integrating a Volume of Fluid (VOF) interface-capturing approach with a non-conforming Immersed Boundary (IB) method to model two-phase flows of highly viscous polymer melts and air within partially filled rotating mixing devices, implemented within the Finite Volume OpenFOAM library. To overcome severe numerical instabilities arising from the strong viscosity contrast between polymer melts and air, a block-coupled scheme providing fully implicit viscous diffusion treatment is integrated into the VOF-IB framework, relaxing time-step stability constraints and substantially reducing computational cost with respect to standard segregated solvers. The resulting BC-VOF-IB solver is applied to industrially relevant geometries of single- and twin-screw extruders, yielding physically consistent predictions of velocity and pressure fields under partial filling conditions. While further developments, most notably the inclusion of thermal effects, remain necessary, the proposed framework represents a meaningful step toward bridging academic CFD research and the practical demands of industrial polymer processing.