An analysis of parasitic current generation in volume of fluid simulations

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.