Date of Graduation

2001

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Type

MS

Committee Chair

Ismail Celik

Abstract

Research is being conducted at West Virginia University (WVU) in collaboration with the Naval Surface Warfare Center Carderock Division (NSWCCD) and Johns Hopkins University (JHU) to study the mixing that occurs during the refueling of U.S. naval vessels. These vessels employ a series of tanks to both store fuel and to maintain the balance of the ship by taking on seawater as the fuel is consumed. Hence, these are referred to as Compensated Fuel/Ballast Tanks (CFBT). This study is applicable to naval destroyers such as the DDG 51 (Arleigh Burke) class. Previous work by Umbel and Wilson under the direction of Dr. Celik at WVU has produced a Single Fluid Scalar Transport (SFST) model designed to solve the mixing and separation of immiscible liquid-liquid flows. This study applies the SFST model in the numerical solution of a two-phase flow inside a two-compartment half-scale model. The similarity between heat and mass transport has been used by many to establish an analogy between heat and mass transfer. A new version of the SFST model, SFST-v3, has been developed taking advantage of this analogous behavior. The use of the heat transfer option in the commercial code CFX-4, developed by AEA Technologies, enables mixture density to influence the flow field through the buoyancy term in the momentum equation. The new approach has the advantage of using built in storage and solver capabilities of the commercial code, thus reducing user errors and complications in memory access.

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