Numerical Visualization of Plunging Water Jet using Volume of Fluid Model

A plunging liquid jet is defined as a moving column of liquid passing through a gaseous headspace, air in our case, before impinging a free surface of receiving liquid pool. The mechanism of air entrainment due to plunging liquid jets is very complex and the complete mechanism of air entrainment is not fully understood so far. The present paper is an unsteady numerical simulation of air entrainment by water jet plunging, using the Volume Of Fluid (VOF) model. The piece wise linear interface construction algorithm (PLIC) for interface tracking is used, to describe the phase distributions of entirely immiscible air and liquid phases. The aim of this work is to investigate the performance and accuracy of the VOF method in predicting the initial impact between the descending jet and water free surface, air entrainment and the developing flow region under free surface. Three scale models based on geometric similarities (Froude number and dimensionless free jet length) are used for validation according to Chanson (2004) experience. The simulations show with accuracy, the air cavity formation steps, caused by the initial jet impact, its deep stretching under the pool free surface, until breakdown due to the shear created by a toroidal vortex. In terms of, air entrainment estimation, bubble dispersion and radial distribution of air volume fraction, large-scale models present a good agreement with the experience. However, for the smallest scale model, the results lead to suggest that air entrainment is governed by more parameters than the geometric similarities.