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An adaptive level set approach for incompressible two-phase flows

Journal Article · · Journal of Computational Physics
 [1]; ; ; ; ;  [2]
  1. Univ. of California, Davis, CA (United States). Dept. of Mathematics
  2. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab., CA (United States). Center for Computational Sciences and Engineering

The authors present a numerical method using the level set approach for solving incompressible two-phase flow with surface tension. In the level set approach, the free surface is represented as the zero level set of a smooth function; this has the effect of replacing the advection of density, which has steep gradients at the free surface, with the advection of the level set function, which is smooth. In addition, the free surface can merge or break up with no special treatment. The authors maintain the level set function as the signed distance from the free surface in order to accurately compute flows with high density ratios and stiff surface tension effects. In this work, they couple the level set scheme to an adaptive projection method for the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations, in order to achieve higher resolution of the free surface with a minimum of addition expense. The authors present two-dimensional axisymmetric and fully three-dimensional results of air bubble and water drop computations.

Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Energy Research, Washington, DC (United States); Los Alamos National Lab., NM (United States)
DOE Contract Number:
AC03-76SF00098; FG03-95ER25271
OSTI ID:
302324
Journal Information:
Journal of Computational Physics, Journal Name: Journal of Computational Physics Journal Issue: 1 Vol. 148; ISSN 0021-9991; ISSN JCTPAH
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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