Title for the PhD subject:

A compressible model for the trans-critical path of near-critical fluids

The objective of the thesis is to be able to model a continuous path from a point above the critical point to a point below the critical point (and vice-versa) near the critical point (in a phase diagram, the critical point corresponds to the maximum of the liquid-gas coexistence curve). The interest of such phenomena is first in the field of space related applications through cryogenic fluids in reservoirs (combustion, pressurization systems) or optical systems (cooling of high resolution cameras, heating and cooling systems). How does a gas -liquid interface behave in a cryogenic reservoir when submitted, at the same time, to a heating and vibration? Another application is related to refrigerator systems functioning with the CO2 fluid. In such systems, the evaporation process is held in supercritical state and the overall efficiency is shown to be greater than the usual refrigerators. All the problems related to heat transfer in multiphase flows and/or phase change processes (improvement of boiling/condensation by active and passive techniques) are thus important. The modelling of such flows needs some efficient numerical tools with some multi-physics models. These tools will allow to take care of the specific thermophysical properties of fluids near the critical point (highly compressible and highly thermally conductive with very low surface tension and thermal diff usion) and also the creation and the disappearance of the interface (from a monophasic supercritical state to a two-phase state below the critical point). Such a model has been developed and tested [1] in the case of a homogeneous cooling for the separation of phases by the gravity field near the critical point. The next goal is to take into account the energy equation (non-homogeneous heating) in order to approach the real case configuration. The first stage of the work will be to couple the momentum and the energy equations (written in a vector form) in a home-based numerical code (Thetis) with the appropriate state equation (issued from literature). In a second stage, the written numerical code will be applied to the case described above (near-critical fluids under vibration and quench of the temperature field at the boundaries [2]) in order to describe and quantify instabilities appearing in experiments under magnetic compensation. Contact : Professor Sakir Amiroudine, sakir.amiroudine@u-bordeaux.fr Scholarship: University of Bordeaux (Ministry of Education and Research) [1] Amiroudine, S., Caltagirone, J.-P., Erriguible, A., A Lagrangian-Eulerian compressible model for the transcritical path of near-critical fluids, International Journal of Multiphase Flow 59, pp. 15-23, 2014. [2] G.Gandikota, D.Chatain, S. Amiroudine, T.Lyubimova, D.Beysens, 2014. Frozen wave instability in near critical hydrogen subjected to horizontal vibration under various gravity fields, Physical Review E 89, 012309, 2014.