A conservative diffuse-interface method for compressible two-phase flows

TL;DR

This paper introduces a conservative diffuse-interface method for simulating immiscible compressible two-phase flows, ensuring physical properties, stability, and accuracy in turbulent and acoustic flow simulations.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel conservative diffuse-interface model with interface-regularization that maintains physical bounds, stability, and thermodynamic consistency, enabling non-dissipative, high-fidelity simulations.

Findings

Maintains boundedness of volume fraction field.

Ensures total-variation-diminishing transport of volume fraction.

Accurately simulates interface evolution, surface tension, and acoustics.

Abstract

In this article, we propose a novel conservative diffuse-interface method for the simulation of immiscible compressible two-phase flows. The proposed method discretely conserves the mass of each phase, momentum and total energy of the system. We use the baseline five-equation model and propose interface-regularization (diffusion--sharpening) terms in such a way that the resulting model maintains the conservative property of the underlying baseline model; and lets us use a central-difference scheme for the discretization of all the operators in the model, which leads to a non-dissipative implementation that is crucial for the simulation of turbulent flows and acoustics. Furthermore, the provable strengths of the proposed model are: (a) the model maintains the boundedness property of the volume fraction field, which is a physical realizability requirement for the simulation of two-phase flows, (b) the proposed model is such that the transport of volume fraction field inherently satisfies the total-variation-diminishing property without having to add any flux limiters that destroy the non-dissipative nature of the scheme, (c) the proposed interface-regularization terms in the model do not spuriously contribute to the kinetic energy of the system and therefore do not affect the non-linear stability of the numerical simulation, and (d) the model is consistent with the second law of thermodynamics. Finally, we present numerical simulations using the model and assess (a) the accuracy of evolution of the interface shape, (b) implementation of surface tension effects, (c) propagation of acoustics and their interaction with material interfaces, (d) the accuracy and robustness of the numerical scheme for simulation of complex high-Reynolds-number flows, and (e) performance and scalability of the method.