ASSESS THE OPENFOAM INTERFOAM SOLVER BY NUMERICAL MODELLING THE EXTENSIONAL FLOW TEST

As happens in many areas, nowadays, the polymer engineering field clearly benefits from the support of computational tools. The computational simulation tools have attracted the interest of individuals working both in fluid dynamics (CFD) and solid mechanics (CSM) fields, mainly due to its high efficiency and excellent capability to solve complex problems. In the past decade, open-source computational libraries have found widespread use in the academy and industry. This is mainly because of the open and free availability of these libraries, are more accessible and allows easy adaptation to specific needs. The open-source OpenFOAM computational library [1] is one of the open-source libraries, which was developed to solve general partial differential governing equations following the FVM approach, and it has extensive use not only for CFD cases but also for CSM ones. OpenFOAM comprises several solvers, which present an extensive list of applications covering both CFD and CSM. Moreover, multi-phase flow modelling is one of the challenging issues in CFD problems, which can be solved through the interFoam solver [2] from OpenFOAM. This solver follows the volume of fluid (VOF) approach [3], which is a robust method for proper tracking an interface of different fluids, in order to capture the interface between two fluids. This work aims to contribute to validation and verification (V&V) of the interFoam solver, by modelling numerically the extensional flow test, which is one of the most important and challenging tests in the rheological characterization of the polymeric materials, based on the Sentmanat Extensional Rheometer (SER) platform [4], and compare its predictions with data collected in experimental measurements.