Meshfree one-fluid modeling of liquid–vapor phase transitions

We introduce a meshfree collocation framework to model the phase change from liquid to vapor at or above the boiling point. While typical vaporization or boiling simulations focus on the vaporization from the bulk of the fluid, here we include the possibility of vaporization from the free surface, when a moving fluid comes into contact with a superheated surface. We present a continuum, one-fluid approach in which the liquid and vapor phases are modeled with the same constitutive equations, with different material properties. The novelty here is a monolithic approach without explicit modeling of the interface between the phases, neither in a sharp nor diffuse sense. Furthermore, no interface boundary conditions or source terms are needed between the liquid and vapor phases. Instead, the phase transition is modeled only using material properties varying with temperature. Towards this end, we also present an enrichment of strong form meshfree generalized finite difference methods (GFDM) to accurately capture derivatives in the presence of jumps in density, viscosity, and other physical properties. The numerical results show a good agreement with experimental results, and highlight the ability of our proposed framework to model phase changes with large jumps.