This paper develops a first-order system least-squares (FOSLS) formulation
for equations of two-phase flow. The main goal is to show that this
discretization, along with numerical techniques such as nested iteration,
algebraic multigrid, and adaptive local refinement, can be used to solve these
types of complex fluid flow problems. In addition, from an energetic
variational approach, it can be shown that an important quantity to preserve in
a given simulation is the energy law. We discuss the energy law and inherent
structure for two-phase flow using the Allen-Cahn interface model and indicate
how it is related to other complex fluid models, such as magnetohydrodynamics.
Finally, we show that, using the FOSLS framework, one can still satisfy the
appropriate energy law globally while using well-known numerical techniques.Comment: 22 pages, 8 figures submitted to Journal of Computational Physic