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