In two-phase flow simulations, a difficult issue is usually the treatment of
surface tension effects. These cause a pressure jump that is proportional to
the curvature of the interface separating the two fluids. Since the evaluation
of the curvature incorporates second derivatives, it is prone to numerical
instabilities. Within this work, the interface is described by a level-set
method based on a discontinuous Galerkin discretization. In order to stabilize
the evaluation of the curvature, a patch-recovery operation is employed. There
are numerous ways in which this filtering operation can be applied in the whole
process of curvature computation. Therefore, an extensive numerical study is
performed to identify optimal settings for the patch-recovery operations with
respect to computational cost and accuracy.Comment: 25 pages, 8 figures, submitted to Communications in Computational
Physic
