An iterative interface reconstruction method for PLIC in general convex grids as part of a Coupled Level Set Volume of Fluid solver

Reconstructing the interface within a cell, based on volume fraction and normal direction, is a key part of multiphase flow solvers which make use of piecewise linear interface calculation (PLIC) such as the Coupled Level Set Volume of Fluid (CLSVOF) method. In this paper, we present an iterative method for interface reconstruction (IR) in general convex cells based on tetrahedral decomposition. By splitting the cell into tetrahedra prior to IR the volume of the truncated polyhedron can be calculated much more rapidly than using existing clipping and capping methods. In addition the root finding algorithm is designed to take advantage of the nature of the relationship between volume fraction and interface position by using a combination of Newton's and Muller's methods. In stand-alone tests of the IR algorithm on single cells with up to 20 vertices the proposed method was found to be 2 times faster than an implementation of an existing analytical method, while being easy to implement. It was also found to be 3.4–11.8 times faster than existing iterative methods using clipping and capping and combined with Brent's root finding method. Tests were then carried out of the IR method as part of a CLSVOF solver. For a sphere deformed by a prescribed velocity field the proposed method was found to be up to 33% faster than existing iterative methods. For simulations including the solution of the velocity field the maximum speed up was found to be approximately 52% for a case where 12% of cells lie on the interface. Analysis of the full simulation CPU time budget also indicates that while the proposed method has produced a considerable speed-up, further gains due to increasing the efficiency of the IR method are likely to be small as the IR step now represents only a small proportion of the run time

Unstructured un-split geometrical Volume-of-Fluid methods -- A review

Geometrical Volume-of-Fluid (VoF) methods mainly support structured meshes, and only a small number of contributions in the scientific literature report results with unstructured meshes and three spatial dimensions. Unstructured meshes are traditionally used for handling geometrically complex solution domains that are prevalent when simulating problems of industrial relevance. However, three-dimensional geometrical operations are significantly more complex than their two-dimensional counterparts, which is confirmed by the ratio of publications with three-dimensional results on unstructured meshes to publications with two-dimensional results or support for structured meshes. Additionally, unstructured meshes present challenges in serial and parallel computational efficiency, accuracy, implementation complexity, and robustness. Ongoing research is still very active, focusing on different issues: interface positioning in general polyhedra, estimation of interface normal vectors, advection accuracy, and parallel and serial computational efficiency. This survey tries to give a complete and critical overview of classical, as well as contemporary geometrical VOF methods with concise explanations of the underlying ideas and sub-algorithms, focusing primarily on unstructured meshes and three dimensional calculations. Reviewed methods are listed in historical order and compared in terms of accuracy and computational efficiency

A Higher-Order VOF Interface Reconstruction Scheme for Non-Orthogonal Structured Grids - with Application to Surface Tension Modelling

The volume-of-fluid (VOF) method [24] is widely used to track the interface for the purpose of simulating liquid-gas interfacial flows numerically. The key strength of VOF is its mass conserving property. However, interface reconstruction is required when geometric properties such as curvature need to be accurately computed. For surface tension modelling in particular, computing the interface curvature accurately is crucial to avoiding so-called spurious or parasitic currents. Of the existing VOF-based schemes, the height-function (HF) method [10, 16, 18, 42, 46, 53] allows accurate interface representation on Cartesian grids. No work has hitherto been done to extend the HF philosophy to non-orthogonal structured grids. To this end, this work proposes a higher-order accurate VOF interface reconstruction method for non-orthogonal structured grids. Higher-order in the context of this work denotes up to 4 th-order. The scheme generalises the interface reconstruction component of the HF method. Columns of control volumes that straddle the interface are identified, and piecewise-linear interface constructions (PLIC) are computed in a volume-conservative manner in each column. To ensure efficiency, this procedure is executed by a novel sweep-plane algorithm based on the convex decomposition of the control volumes in each column. The PLIC representation of the interface is then smoothed by iteratively refining the PLIC facet normals. Rapid convergence of the latter is achieved via a novel spring-based acceleration procedure. The interface is then reconstructed by fitting higher-order polynomial curves/surfaces to local stencils of PLIC facets in a least squares manner [29]. Volume conservation is optimised for at the central column. The accuracy of the interface reconstruction procedure is evaluated via grid convergence studies in terms of volume conservation and curvature errors. The scheme is shown to achieve arbitrary-order accuracy on Cartesian grids and up to fourth-order accuracy on non-orthogonal structured grids. The curvature computation scheme is finally applied in a balanced-force continuum-surface-force (CSF) [4] surface tension scheme for variable-density flows on nonorthogonal structured grids in 2D. Up to fourth-order accuracy is demonstrated for the Laplace pressure jump in the simulation of a 2D stationary bubble with a high liquid-gas density ratio. A significant reduction in parasitic currents is demonstrated. Lastly, second-order accuracy is achieved when computing the frequency of a 2D inviscid oscillating droplet in zero gravity. The above tools were implemented and evaluated using the Elemental®multi-physics code and using a vertex-centred finite volume framework. For the purpose of VOF advection the algebraic CICSAM scheme (available in Elemental®) was employed

Large eddy simulation of primary liquid-sheet breakup

This research project aims at providing the aeronautical industry with a modelling capability to simulate the fuel injection in gas turbine combustion chambers. The path to this objective started with the review of state-of-the-art numerical techniques to model the primary breakup of liquid fuel into droplets. Based on this and keeping in mind the requirements of the industry, our modelling strategy led to the generation of a mass-conservative method for efficient atomisation modelling on unstructured meshes. This goal has been reached with the creation of high-order numerical schemes for unstructured grids, the development of an efficient numerical method that transports the liquid-vapour interface accurately while conserving mass and the implementation of an algorithm that outputs the droplet boundary conditions to separate combustion codes. Both high-order linear and WENO schemes have been created for general polyhedral meshes. The notorious complexity of high-order schemes on 3D mixed-element meshes has been handled by the creation of a series of algorithms. These include the tetrahedralisation of the mesh, which allows generality of the approach while remaining efficient and affordable, together with a novel approach to stencil generation and a faster interpolation of the solution. The performance of the scheme has been demonstrated on typical two-dimensional and three-dimensional test cases for both linear and non-linear hyperbolic partial differential equations. The conservative level set method has been extended to unstructured meshes and its performance has been improved in terms of robustness and accuracy. This was achieved by solving the equations for the transport of the liquid volume fraction with our novel WENO scheme for polyhedral meshes and by adding a flux-limiter algorithm. The resulting method, named robust conservative level set, conserves mass to machine accuracy and its ability to capture the physics of the atomisation is demonstrated in this thesis. To be readily applicable to the simulation of atomisation, the novel interfacecapturing technique has been embedded in a framework — within the open source CFD code OpenFOAM — that solves the velocity and pressure fields, outputs droplet characteristics and runs in parallel. In particular, the production of droplet boundary conditions involves a set of routines handling the selection of drops in the level set field, the calculation of relevant droplet characteristics and their storage into data files. An n-halo parallelisation method has been implemented in OpenFOAM to perform the computations at the expected order of accuracy. Finally, the modelling capability has been demonstrated on the simulation of primary liquid-sheet breakup with relevance to fuel injection in aero-engine combustors. The computation has demonstrated the ability of the code to capture the physics accurately and further illustrates the potential of the numerical approach