ANZIAM J. 46(E) ppC133--C149, 2005.

An analysis of parasitic current generation in volume of fluid simulations

D. J. E. Harvie

M. R. Davidson

M. Rudman

(Received 29 November 2004, revised 17 February 2005)

Abstract

Parasitic currents are unphysical currents generated when using implementations of the Continuum Surface Force technique to model surface tension forces in multi-phase Computational Fluid Dynamics problems. We derive and validate a correlation for the magnitudes of these currents as a function of the physical and numerical parameters used in a given simulation. We find that these currents may be limited by both the inertial and viscous terms in the Navier--Stokes equations, and as observed by previous researchers, that they do not decrease in magnitude with increased mesh refinement nor decreased computational time step.

Download to your computer

Authors

D. J. E. Harvie
Dept. Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, University of Melbourne, Australia. mailto:daltonh@unimelb.edu.au
M. R. Davidson
Dept. Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, University of Melbourne, Australia.
M. Rudman
CSIRO, Manufacturing & Infrastructure Technology, Melbourne, Australia.

Published April 19, 2005. ISSN 1446-8735

References

  1. J. U. Brackbill, D. Juric, D. Torres, and E. Kallman. Dynamic modelling of microgravity flow. In Fourth Microgravity Fluid Physics and Transport Phenomena Conference, pages 584--589, Cleveland, Ohio, USA, Aug. 12--14 1998. National Centre for Microgravity Research.
  2. J. U. Brackbill, D. B. Kothe, and C. Zemach. A continuum method for modelling surface tension. Journal of Computational Physics, 100:335--354, 1992.
  3. D. Jamet, D. Torres, and J. U. Brackbill. On the theory and computation of surface tension: The elimination of parasitic currents through energy conservation in the second-gradient method. Journal of Computational Physics, 182:262--276, 2002.
  4. B. Lafaurie, C. Nardone, R. Scardovelli, S. Zaleski, and G. Zanetti. Modelling merging and fragmentation in multiphase flows with {SURFER}. Journal of Computational Physics, 113:134--147, 1994.
  5. M. Meier, G. Yadigaroglu, and B. L. Smith. A novel technique for including surface tension in plic-vof methods. Eur. J. Mech. B/Fluids, 21:61--73, 2002.
  6. Y. Renardy and M. Renardy. Prost: A parabolic reconstruction of surface tension for the volume-of-fluid method. Journal of Computational Physics, 183:400--421, 2002.
  7. M. Rudman. A volume-tracking method for incompressible multifluid flows with large density variations. International Journal for Numerical Methods in Fluids, 28:357--378, 1998.
  8. R. Scardovelli and S. Zaleski. direct numerical simulation of free-surface and interfacial flow. Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics, 31:567--603, 1999.