Abstract

Simulations for both multiphase flows and supersonic single phased flows are well known, however the combination is a less investigated area of research, as the two basic approaches of CFD, the pressure and the density based approach, each describe one of the phases in a better way than the other one. In this paper, we systematically investigate the solver quality of the open source CFD code OpenFOAM in handling transonic flow phenomena that typically occur inside the breaking chamber of high voltage circuit breakers, during contact separation. The solver quality is then compared with that of chosen commercial CFD tools. The main advantage of OpenFOAM is that, contrary to most of the commercial simulation tools, it is license fee free and allows access to the source code. This means that complicated multi physics phenomena inside the arcing chamber can be directly modeled into the code by users, which opens an opportunity to remove limitations of commercial CFD tools. Particularly, the shock capturing capability of OpenFOAM will be evaluated for the transonic internal flow which typically occurs in high voltage circuit breakers. Overall, Open-FOAM shows acceptable shock capturing capabilities in the performed verification and validation studies, with the solver quality comparable to some of the tested commercial CFD tools. There is still room for further solver quality improvements in OpenFOAM by implementing better shock capturing schemes such as a density-based flux-difference-splitting scheme or by writing better physical modeling of the shock/boundary layer interaction into the open architecture of OpenFOAM.