A fully Eulerian hybrid Immersed Boundary-Phase Field Model for contact line dynamics on complex geometries

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fully Eulerian hybrid immersed boundary-phase field model for simulating contact line dynamics on complex geometries, enabling accurate and scalable multiphase flow simulations with complex boundary conditions.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel Eulerian hybrid immersed boundary-phase field model that accurately handles contact line motion on arbitrary geometries with scalable parallel implementation.

Findings

Successfully validated with multiple tests.

Capable of simulating droplet spreading on complex surfaces.

Efficient parallelization of multiphase simulations.

Abstract

We present a fully Eulerian hybrid immersed-boundary/phase-field model to simulate wetting and contact line motion over any arbitrary geometry. The solid wall is described with a volume-penalisation ghost-cell immersed boundary whereas the interface between the two fluids by a diffuse-interface method. The contact line motion on the complex wall is prescribed via slip velocity in the momentum equation and static/dynamic contact angle condition for the order parameter of the Cahn-Hilliard model. This combination requires accurate computations of the normal and tangential gradients of the scalar order parameter and of the components of the velocity. However, the present algorithm requires the computation of averaging weights and other geometrical variables as a preprocessing step. Several validation tests are reported in the manuscript, together with 2D simulations of a droplet spreading over a sinusoidal wall with different contact angles and slip length and a spherical droplet spreading over a sphere, showing that the proposed algorithm is capable to deal with the three-phase contact line motion over any complex wall. The Eulerian feature of the algorithm facilitates the implementation and provides a straight-forward and potentially highly scalable parallelisation. The employed parallelisation of the underlying Navier-Stokes solver can be efficiently used for the multiphase part as well. The procedure proposed here can be directly employed to impose any types of boundary conditions (Neumann, Dirichlet and mixed) for any field variable evolving over a complex geometry, modelled with an immersed-boundary approach (for instance, modelling deformable biological membranes, red blood cells, solidification, evaporation and boiling, to name a few)