Numerical simulation of film boiling heat transfer in immersion quenching process using Eulerian two-fluid approach

Abstract

This paper presents a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation of the quenching process based on ISO 9950, focusing on the heat flux and heat transfer coefficient integrated over a metal specimen. The numerical method, which employs the two-fluid VOF method and frozen turbulence approach (Cukrov et al., Appl. Sci. 2023, 13, 9144), is used for the transient simulation. Since quenching processes involve complex boiling phenomena shifting from film boiling to nucleate boiling, a standard method based on VOF cannot be applied. The comparison of the simulation results with the ones obtained using correlation, and the data obtained using the Inverse Heat Transfer Analysis (IHTA) method have revealed that the proposed method can accurately predict the heat flux and heat transfer coefficient in the film boiling regime of the immersion quenching process. Note that the previous paper (Cukrov et al., Energies. 2023, 16, 7926.) presented the immersion process modeling and the temperature distribution, while the current paper examines the heat transfer characteristics of the immersion quenching process.