A refined volume-of-fluid algorithm for capturing sharp fluid interfaces on arbitrary meshes

This paper presents a new volume-of-fluid scheme (M-CICSAM), capable of capturing abrupt interfaces on meshes of arbitrary topology, which is a modification to the compressive interface capturing scheme for arbitrary meshes (CICSAM) proposed in the recent literature. Without resort to any explicit interface reconstruction, M-CICSAM is able to precisely model the complex free surface deformation, such as interface rupture and coalescence. By theoretical analysis, it is shown that the modified CICSAM overcomes three inherent drawbacks of the original CICSAM, concerning the basic differencing schemes, the switching strategy between the compressive downwind and diffusive high-resolution schemes, and the far-upwind reconstruction technique on arbitrary unstructured meshes. To evaluate the performance of the newly proposed scheme, several classic interface capturing methods developed in the past decades are compared with M-CICSAM in four test problems. The numerical results clearly demonstrate that M-CICSAM produces more accurate predictions on arbitrary meshes, especially at high Courant numbers, by reducing the numerical diffusion and preserving the interface shape.The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support provided by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51279082) and the State Key Laboratory of Hydroscience and Engineering of Tsinghua University (Grant No. 2013-KY-3).This is the accepted manuscript version. The final version is available from Elsevier at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0021999114004501

Two fluid space-time discontinuous Galerkin finite element method. Part I: numerical algorithm

A novel numerical method for two fluid flow computations is presented, which combines the space-time discontinuous Galerkin finite element discretization with the level set method and cut-cell based interface tracking. The space-time discontinuous Galerkin (STDG) finite element method offers high accuracy, an inherent ability to handle discontinuities and a very local stencil, making it relatively easy to combine with local {\it hp}-refinement. The front tracking is incorporated via cut-cell mesh refinement to ensure a sharp interface between the fluids. To compute the interface dynamics the level set method (LSM) is used because of its ability to deal with merging and breakup. Also, the LSM is easy to extend to higher dimensions. Small cells arising from the cut-cell refinement are merged to improve the stability and performance. The interface conditions are incorporated in the numerical flux at the interface and the STDG discretization ensures that the scheme is conservative as long as the numerical fluxes are conservative

A space-time discontinuous Galerkin finite element method for two-fluid problems

A space-time discontinuous Galerkin finite element method for two fluid flow problems is presented. By using a combination of level set and cut-cell methods the interface between two fluids is tracked in space-time. The movement of the interface in space-time is calculated by solving the level set equation, where the interface geometry is identified with the 0-level set. To enhance the accuracy of the interface approximation the level set function is advected with the interface velocity, which for this purpose is extended into the domain. Close to the interface the mesh is locally refined in such a way that the 0-level set coincides with a set of faces in the mesh. The two fluid flow equations are solved on this refined mesh. The procedure is repeated until both the mesh and the flow solution have converged to a reasonable accuracy.\ud The method is tested on linear advection and Euler shock tube problems involving ideal gas and compressible bubbly magma. Oscillations around the interface are eliminated by choosing a suitable interface flux

Parallel load balancing strategy for Volume-of-Fluid methods on 3-D unstructured meshes

© 2016. This version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/l Volume-of-Fluid (VOF) is one of the methods of choice to reproduce the interface motion in the simulation of multi-fluid flows. One of its main strengths is its accuracy in capturing sharp interface geometries, although requiring for it a number of geometric calculations. Under these circumstances, achieving parallel performance on current supercomputers is a must. The main obstacle for the parallelization is that the computing costs are concentrated only in the discrete elements that lie on the interface between fluids. Consequently, if the interface is not homogeneously distributed throughout the domain, standard domain decomposition (DD) strategies lead to imbalanced workload distributions. In this paper, we present a new parallelization strategy for general unstructured VOF solvers, based on a dynamic load balancing process complementary to the underlying DD. Its parallel efficiency has been analyzed and compared to the DD one using up to 1024 CPU-cores on an Intel SandyBridge based supercomputer. The results obtained on the solution of several artificially generated test cases show a speedup of up to similar to 12x with respect to the standard DD, depending on the interface size, the initial distribution and the number of parallel processes engaged. Moreover, the new parallelization strategy presented is of general purpose, therefore, it could be used to parallelize any VOF solver without requiring changes on the coupled flow solver. Finally, note that although designed for the VOF method, our approach could be easily adapted to other interface-capturing methods, such as the Level-Set, which may present similar workload imbalances. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. Allrights reserved.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft