Effective Modelling of Multi-Phase Heat and Mass Transfer Systems

The effective modelling of heat and mass transfer in strongly coupled multi-phase systems has presented a challenge in computational mechanics for the last decade. This work considers problems which range from non-linear heat conduction to single and multi-species porous systems. A set of volume-averaged local thermal-disequilibium governing equations are employed to describe the general case. Special attention is given to account for conductive, convective, radiative and phase change effects within the domain as well as at boundaries. All non-linear variations in phenomenological coefficients are fully and accurately accounted for. Enhanced hybrid-unstructured compact edge-based finite volume technology [1,2] is developed for spatial discretized and a generalized artificial-compressibility pressure-projection methodology [3] employed for solution purposes. The latter is both efficient and completely matrix free. For the purpose of reducing computational time while preserving the matrix-free nature of the technology we develop two methodologies viz. distributed memory parallelization and a preconditioned Generalised Minimal Residual (GMRES) algorithm. The METIS library is used for balanced domain decomposition and super linear speed-up demonstrated. A semi-analytical Newton-linearizatio