Three-dimensional numerical computation of gas-liquid two-phase flow under pseudo microgravity environment using a superconducting electromagnet

Abstract

By using the strong magnetic field generated by a superconducting electromagnet, theoretically it is possible to produce the pseudo microgravity environment on the ground. The final goal of this research is to obtain knowledge of fluid control under a strong magnetic field using a superconducting electromagnet. In this study, in order to examine a method for accurate CFD computation, we carried out computation for a gas-liquid two-phase flow under a strong magnetic field. A milk crown phenomenon inside the bore of superconducting electromagnet is studied. The liquid is assumed to be an aqueous gadolinium nitrate solution (15%). The CLSVOF method is used for the computation of the two-phase flow and the HSMAC method is used for the pressure correction. We evaluate how much the interior of the superconducting electromagnet is in a pseudo microgravity environment by using the equation expressing the gravity level. In addition, in order to speed up the calculation, GPU parallel computation is performed, realizing about 22 times faster than CPU single computation. As a result, we succeeded in investigating a method for computation a gas-liquid two-phase flow in a strong magnetic field.