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A refined volume-of-fluid algorithm for capturing sharp fluid interfaces on arbitrary meshes


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Authors

Zhang, D 
Jiang, C 
Liang, D 
Yang, Y 

Abstract

This paper presents a new volume-of-fluid scheme (M-CICSAM), capable of capturing abrupt interfaces on meshes of arbitrary topology, which is a modification to the compressive interface capturing scheme for arbitrary meshes (CICSAM) proposed in the recent literature. Without resort to any explicit interface reconstruction, M-CICSAM is able to precisely model the complex free surface deformation, such as interface rupture and coalescence. By theoretical analysis, it is shown that the modified CICSAM overcomes three inherent drawbacks of the original CICSAM, concerning the basic differencing schemes, the switching strategy between the compressive downwind and diffusive high-resolution schemes, and the far-upwind reconstruction technique on arbitrary unstructured meshes. To evaluate the performance of the newly proposed scheme, several classic interface capturing methods developed in the past decades are compared with M-CICSAM in four test problems. The numerical results clearly demonstrate that M-CICSAM produces more accurate predictions on arbitrary meshes, especially at high Courant numbers, by reducing the numerical diffusion and preserving the interface shape.

Description

Keywords

Two-phase flows, Interface capturing, Unstructured meshes, Volume of fluid (VOF), Normalized variable diagram (NVD), Normalized variable and space formulation (NVSF)

Journal Title

Journal of Computational Physics

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0021-9991
1090-2716

Volume Title

274

Publisher

Elsevier BV
Sponsorship
The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support provided by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51279082) and the State Key Laboratory of Hydroscience and Engineering of Tsinghua University (Grant No. 2013-KY-3).