Toward free-surface flow simulations with correct energy evolution: an isogeometric level-set approach with monolithic time-integration

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel isogeometric level-set method with monolithic time-integration that ensures correct energy evolution in free-surface flow simulations, significantly improving accuracy and efficiency over traditional methods.

Contribution

It develops a monolithic formulation with energy constraints and divergence-conforming NURBS discretization to accurately simulate two-fluid flows with proper energy behavior.

Findings

Numerical results confirm correct energy evolution in dambreak simulations.

The method achieves higher accuracy with fewer degrees of freedom.

Significant improvement over traditional free-surface flow approaches.

Abstract

This paper presents a new monolithic free-surface formulation that exhibits correct kinetic and potential energy behavior. We focus in particular on the temporal energy behavior of two-fluids flow with varying densities. Correct energy behavior here means that the actual energy evolution of the numerical solution matches the evolution as predicted by the discrete two-fluid equations. We adopt the level-set method to describe the two-fluid surface. To ensure the correct energy behavior we augment the interface convection equation with kinetic and potential energy constraints. We solve the resulting formulation consisting of the fluid and interface equations in a monolithic fashion using a recently proposed level-set method [I. Akkerman. Monotone level-sets on arbitrary meshes without redistancing. Computers & Fluids, 146:74-85, 2017.]. For the spatial discretization divergence-conforming NURBS are adopted. The resulting discrete equations are solved with a quasi-newton method which partially decouples the constraints from the rest of the problem. The simulation of a dambreak problem numerically supports the correct energy behavior of the proposed methodology. This improves the solution quality significantly upon a more traditional approach. Due to the excellent accuracy per degree of freedom one can suffice with a much lower resolution.