Influence of a nonlinear degenerate diffusion on an advection-diffusion equation in a diffuse interface framework

This work is motivated by the modelling a liquid-vapour flows with phase transition describing the evolution of the coolant within an heat exchanger (e.g. the core of a Pressurized Water Reactor). We investigate an advection-diffusion equation with a degenerate and nonlinear diffusion coefficient. The degeneracy corresponds to a liquid-vapor mixture in the original model whereas the diffusion coefficient is non-degenerate in the pure phase cases. We focus on the influence of the diffusion coefficient on a simple 1D configuration for which some analytical computations can be done, leading to a surprising behavior of the phase transition with respect to the diffusion.