A Preconditioning Mass Matrix to Avoid the Ill-Posed Two-Fluid Model

Two-fluid models are central to the simulation of transport processes in two-phase homogenized systems. Even though this physical model has been widely accepted, an inherently nonhyperbolic and nonconservative ill-posed problem arises from the mathematical point of view. It has been demonstrated that this drawback occurs even for a very simplified model, i.e., an inviscid model with no interfacial terms. Much effort has been made to remedy this anomaly and in the literature two different types of approaches can be found. On one hand, extra terms with physical origin are added to model the interphase interaction, but even though this methodology seems to be realistic, several extra parameters arise from each added term with the associated difficulty in their estimation. On the other hand, mathematical based-work has been done to find a way to remove the complex eigenvalues obtained with two-fluid model equations. Preconditioned systems, characterized as a projection of the complex eigenvalues over the real axis, may be one of the choices. The aim of this paper is to introduce a simple and novel mathematical strategy based on the application of a preconditioning mass matrix that circumvents the drawback caused by the nonhyperbolic behavior of the original model. Although the mass and momentum conservation equations are modified, the target of this methodology is to present another way to reach a steady-state solution (using a time marching scheme), greatly valued by researchers in industrial process design. Attaining this goal is possible because only the temporal term is affected by the preconditioner. The obtained matrix has two parameters that correct the nonhyperbolic behavior of the model: the first one modifies the eigenvalues removing their imaginary part and the second one recovers the real part of the original eigenvalues. Besides the theoretical development of the preconditioning matrix, several numerical results are presented to show the validity of the method.