An accelerated sharp-interface method for multiphase flows simulations

In this work, we develop an accelerated sharp-interface method based on (Hu et al., JCP, 2006) and (Luo et al., JCP, 2015) for multiphase flows simulations. Traditional multiphase simulation methods use the minimum time step of all fluids obtained according to CFL conditions to evolve the fluid states, which limits the computational efficiency, as the sound speed c of one fluid may be much larger than the others. To address this issue, based on the original GFM-like sharp interface methods, the present method is developed by solving the governing equations of each individual fluid with the corresponding time step. Without violating the numerical stability requirement, the states of fluid with larger time-scale features will be updated with a larger time step. The interaction step between two fluids is solved for synchronization, which is handled by interpolating the intermediate states of fluid with larger time-scale features. In addition, an interfacial flux correction is implemented to maintain the conservative property. The present method can be combined with a wavelet-based adaptive multi-resolution algorithm (Han et al., JCP, 2014) to achieve additional computational efficiency. A number of numerical tests indicate that the accuracy of the results obtained by the present method is comparable to the original costly method, with a significant speedup

A variational-level-set based partitioning method for block-structured meshes

We propose a numerical method for solving block-structured mesh partitioning problems based on the variational level-set method of (Zhao et al., J Comput Phys 127, 1996) which has been widely used in many partitioning problems such as image segmentation and shape optimization. Here, the variational model and its level-set formulation have been simplified that only one single level-set function is evolved. Thus, the numerical implementation becomes simple, and the computational and memory overhead are significantly alleviated, making this method suitable for solving realistic block-structured mesh partitioning problems where a large number of regions is required. We start to verify this method by a range of two-dimensional and three-dimensional uniform mesh partitioning cases. The results agree with the theoretical solutions very well and converge rapidly. More complex cases, including block-structured adaptive mesh partitioning for single-phase and multi-phase multi-resolution simulations, confirm the accuracy, robustness and good convergence property. The measured CPU time shows that this method is efficient for both two-dimensional and three-dimensional realistic partitioning problems in parallel computing. The proposed method has the potential to be extended to solve other partitioning problems by replacing the energy functional

A consistent analytical formulation for volume-estimation of geometries enclosed by implicitly defined surfaces

We have derived an analytical formulation for estimating the volume of geometries enclosed by implicitly defined surfaces. The novelty of this work is due to two aspects. First we provide a general analytical formulation for all two-dimensional cases, and for elementary three three-dimensional cases by which the volume of general three-dimensional cases can be computed. Second, our method addresses the inconsistency issue due to mesh refinement. It is demonstrated by several two-dimensional and three-dimensional cases that this analytical formulation exhibits 2nd-order accuracy

A network partition method for solving large-scale complex nonlinear processes

A numerical framework based on network partition and operator splitting is developed to solve nonlinear differential equations of large-scale dynamic processes encountered in physics, chemistry and biology. Under the assumption that those dynamic processes can be characterized by sparse networks, we minimize the number of splitting for constructing subproblems by network partition. Then the numerical simulation of the original system is simplified by solving a small number of subproblems, with each containing uncorrelated elementary processes. In this way, numerical difficulties of conventional methods encountered in large-scale systems such as numerical instability, negative solutions, and convergence issue are avoided. In addition, parallel simulations for each subproblem can be achieved, which is beneficial for large-scale systems. Examples with complex underlying nonlinear processes, including chemical reactions and reaction-diffusion on networks, demonstrate that this method generates convergent solution in a efficient and robust way

A conservative sharp-interface method for compressible multi-material flows

In this paper we develop a conservative sharp-interface method dedicated to simulating multiple compressible fluids. Numerical treatments for a cut cell shared by more than two materials are proposed. First, we simplify the interface interaction inside such a cell with a reduced model to avoid explicit interface reconstruction and complex flux calculation. Second, conservation is strictly preserved by an efficient conservation correction procedure for the cut cell. To improve the robustness, a multi-material scale separation model is developed to consistently remove non-resolved interface scales. In addition, the multi-resolution method and local time-stepping scheme are incorporated into the proposed multi-material method to speed up the high-resolution simulations. Various numerical test cases, including the multi-material shock tube problem, inertial confinement fusion implosion, triple-point shock interaction and shock interaction with multi-material bubbles, show that the method is suitable for a wide range of complex compressible multi-material flows

A Split Random Time Stepping Method for Stiff and Non-stiff Chemically Reacting Flows

In this paper, a new fractional step method is proposed for simulating stiff and nonstiff chemically reacting flows. In stiff cases, a well-known spurious numerical phenomenon, i.e. the incorrect propagation speed of discontinuities, may be produced by general fractional step methods due to the under-resolved discretization in both space and time. The previous random projection method has been successfully applied for stiff detonation capturing in under-resolved conditions. Not to randomly project the intermediate state into two presumed equilibrium states (completely burnt or unburnt) as in the random projection method, the present study is to randomly choose the time-dependent advance or stop of a reaction process. Each one-way reaction has been decoupled from the multi-reaction kinetics using operator splitting and the local smeared temperature due to numerical dissipation of shock-capturing schemes is compared with a random one within two limited temperatures corresponding to the advance and its inverse states, respectively, to control the random reaction. The random activation or deactivation in the reaction step is thus promising to correct the deterministic accumulative error of the propagation of discontinuities. Extensive numerical experiments, including model problems and realistic reacting flows in one and two dimensions, demonstrate this expectation as well as the effectiveness and robustness of the method. Meanwhile, for nonstiff problems when spatial and temporal resolutions are fine, the proposed random method recovers the results as general fractional step methods, owing to the increasing possibility of activation with diminishing randomness by adding a shift term.Comment: 48 pages, 14 figure

Finite volume based film flow and ice accretion models on aircraft wings

The thin runback water films driven by the gas flow, the pressure gradient and the gravity on the iced aircraft surface are investigated in this paper. A three-dimensional film flow model based on Finite Volume Method (FVM) and the lubrication theory is proposed to describe the flow. The depth-averaged velocity of the film is stored in Cartesian coordinates to avoid the appearance of the metric tensors. The governing equations are discretized in the first layer structured grid cell which is selected as the grids for film flow. In order to verify this method, comparisons between numerical results and experimental results of ice shapes on NACA 0012 airfoil and GLC-305 swept wing are presented, both showing a good agreement for rime and glaze ice condition. Overall, this model shows great potential to model ice accretion reasonably under different icing conditions. Besides, the present method doesn't require analytic metric terms, and can be easily coupled to existing finite volume solvers for logically Cartesian meshes

A sufficient condition for free-stream preserving in the nonlinear conservative finite difference schemes on curvilinear grids

In simulations of compressible flows, the conservative finite difference method (FDM) based on the nonlinear upwind schemes, e.g. WENO5, might violate free-stream preserving (FP), due to the loss of the geometric conservation law (GCL) identity when applied on the curvilinear grids. Although some techniques on FP have been proposed previously, no general rule is given for this issue. In this paper, by rearranging the upwind dissipation of the nonlinear schemes as a combination of sub-stencil reconstructions (taking WENO5 as an example), it can be proved that the upwind dissipation diminishes under the uniform flow condition if the metrics yield an identical value under the same schemes with these reconstructions, making the free-stream condition be preserved. According to this sufficient condition, the novel FP metrics are constructed for WENO5 and WENO7. By this means the original forms of these WENO schemes can be kept. In addition, the accuracy of these schemes can be retained as well with a simple accuracy compensation by replacing the central part fluxes with a high-order one. Various validations indicate that the present FP schemes retain the great capability to resolve the smooth regions accurately and capture the discontinuities robustly

A species-clustered ODE solver for large-scale chemical kinetics using detailed mechanisms

In this study, a species-clustered ordinary differential equations (ODE) solver for chemical kinetics with large detailed mechanisms based on operator-splitting is presented. The ODE system is split into clusters of species by using graph partition methods which has been intensively studied in areas of model reduction, parameterization and coarse-graining, etc. , such as diffusion maps based on the concept of Markov random walk. Definition of the weight (similarity) matrix is application-driven and according to chemical kinetics. Each cluster of species is then integrated by VODE, an implicit solver which is intractable and costly for large systems of many species and reactions. Expected speedup in computational efficiency is observed by numerical experiments on three zero-dimensional (0D) auto-ignition problems, considering the detailed hydrocarbon/air combustion mechanisms in varying scales, from 53 species with 325 reactions of methane to 2115 species with 8157 reactions of n-hexadecane.Comment: 28 pages and 14 figure

Reformulated dissipation for the free-stream preserving of the conservative finite difference schemes on curvilinear grids

In this paper, we develop a new free-stream preserving (FP) method for high-order upwind conservative finite-difference (FD) schemes on the curvilinear grids. This FP method is constrcuted by subtracting a reference cell-face flow state from each cell-center value in the local stencil of the original upwind conservative FD schemes, which effectively leads to a reformulated dissipation. It is convenient to implement this method, as it does not require to modify the original forms of the upwind schemes. In addition, the proposed method removes the constraint in the traditional FP conservative FD schemes that require a consistent discretization of the mesh metrics and the fluxes. With this, the proposed method is more flexible in simulating the engineering problems which usually require a low-order scheme for their low-quality mesh, while the high-order schemes can be applied to approximate the flow states to improve the resolution. After demonstrating the strict FP property and the order of accuracy by two simple test cases, we consider various validation cases, including the supersonic flow around the cylinder, the subsonic flow past the three-element airfoil, and the transonic flow around the ONERA M6 wing, etc., to show that the method is suitable for a wide range of fluid dynamic problems containing complex geometries. Moreover, these test cases also indicate that the discretization order of the metrics have no significant influences on the numerical results if the mesh resolution is not sufficiently large