Thin Film Fluid Flow Simulation on Rotating Discs

Prediction and analysis of complex industrial processes depend on accurate modelling of physical phenomena. One particular group of them, free-surface liquid film flows on spinning discs, forms a central piece of many industrial processes, for example a wet chemical wafer etching, a coating etc. This work presents a series of numerical studies of the film flow with an impinging jet on rotating discs which is the basis for a high performance simulation tool. Numerical studies based on the Volume-of-Fluid (VoF) method were performed and evaluated against reported experimental data. The conclusion drawn is that a transient two-phase 3D free-surface VoF-simulation is impractical for an industrial use due to time constraints. A thin film model based on an integral method is proposed as a possible remedy. The model was implemented in the open-source software toolkit OpenFOAM using the Finite Area method. The approach is validated with the ANSYS Fluent software and its VoF-implementation. An extension of the model with a simple diffusion-controlled chemistry model for a wet chemical etching of silicon wafers is presented.