(538b) An Eulerian, Lattice-Based Cellular Automata Approach for Modeling Multiphase Flows

Commonly found in nature and engineering, multiphase flows contain interacting media of different phases. Traditionally, there have been two ways to model such flows in computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The Eulerian-Eulerian approach, in which each phase is modeled as interpenetrating continua, is computationally efficient but does not provide the discrete particle locations. The Eulerian-Lagrangian approach treats the dispersed phase as individual particles interacting with a fluid continuum, but is a computationally demanding approach especially for flows containing a large number of particles. This work introduces an Eulerian-Lagrangian approach for modeling multiphase flows, in which the fluid is modeled as a continuum, and the particle phase is modeled using lattice-based cellular automata (CA). In CA, particles are modeled on a lattice which allows them to evolve spatially and temporally according to rule-based mathematics or physics-based kinematic relations. By employing the latter, this work examines the feasibility of this approach for modeling multiphase flows while achieving significant speedups in computational times.