Coupled fluid-solid thermal interaction modeling for efficient transient simulation of biphasic water-steam energy systems

This paper proposes a fluid-solid coupled finite element formulation for the transient simulation of water-steam energy systems with phase change due to boiling and condensation. As it is commonly assumed in the study of thermal systems, the transient effects considered are exclusively originated by heat transfer processes. A homogeneous mixture model is adopted for the analysis of biphasic flow, resulting in a nonlinear transient advection-diffusion-reaction energy equation and an integral form for mass conservation in the fluid, coupled to the linear transient heat conduction equation for the solid. The conservation equations are approximated applying a stabilized Petrov-Galerkin FEM formulation, providing a set of coupled nonlinear equations for mass and energy conservation. This numerical model, combined with experimental heat transfer coefficients, provides a comprehensive simulation tool for the coupled analysis of boiling and condensation processes. For the treatment of enthalpy discontinuities traveling with the flow, a novel explicit-implicit time integration method based on Crank-Nicolson scheme is proposed, analyzing its accuracy and stability properties. To reduce problem size and enhance numerical efficiency, a modal superposition method with balanced truncation is applied to the solid equations. Finally, different example problems are solved to demonstrate the capabilities, flexibility and accuracy of the proposed formulation.