Phase changes and heat exchanges are examples of physical processes appearing in many industrial applications involving multiphase compressible flows. Their knowledge is of fundamental importance to reproduce correctly the resulting effects in simulation tools. A fine description of the flow topology is thus required to obtain the interfacial area between phases. This one is responsible for the dynamics and the kinetics of heat and mass transfer when evaporation or condensation occurs. Unfortunately this exchange area cannot be obtained easily and accurately especially when complex mixtures (drops, bubbles, pockets of very different sizes) appear inside the transient medium. The natural way to solve this specific trouble consists in using a thin grid to capture interfaces at all spatial scales. But this possibility needs huge computing resources and can be hardly used when considering physical systems of large dimensions. A realistic method is to consider instantaneous exchanges between phases by the way of additional source terms in a full non-equilibrium multiphase flow model [2,15,17]. In this one each phase obeys its own equation of state and has its own set of equations and variables (pressure, temperature, velocity, energy, entropy,...). When enabling the relaxation source terms the multiphase mixture instantaneously tends towards a mechanical or thermodynamic equilibrium state at each point of the flow. This strategy allows to mark the boundaries of the real flow behavior and to magnify the dominant physical effects (heat exchanges, evaporation, drag,...) inside the medium. A description of the various relaxation processes is given in the paper.
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