Comparison of interface capturing methods for the simulation of two-phase flow in a unified low-Mach framework

TL;DR

This study compares four interface capturing methods within a unified low-Mach framework, evaluating their accuracy, conservation, and suitability for simulating two-phase flows, especially in capillary-driven scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive comparison of VOF, SLS, ACLS, and CLSVOF methods within a unified low-Mach framework, highlighting CLSVOF as the most promising for two-phase flow simulations.

Findings

CLSVOF shows superior conservation and topology accuracy.

VOF, CLSVOF, and ACLS tend to create artificial structures.

SLS suffers from conservation issues at mesh resolution limits.

Abstract

This paper proposes a comparison of four popular interface capturing methods : the volume of fluid (VOF), the standard level set (SLS), the accurate conservative level set (ACLS) and the coupled level set and volume of fluid (CLSVOF). All methods are embedded into a unified low-Mach framework based on a Cartesian-grid finite-volume discretization. This framework includes a sharp transport of the interface, a wellbalanced surface tension discretization and a consistent mass and momentum transport which allows capillary-driven simulations with high density ratio. The comparison relies on shared metrics for geometrical accuracy, mass and momentum conservation which exposes the weakness and strengths of each method. Finally, the versatility and capabilities of the proposed solver are demonstrated on the simulation of a 3D head-on collision of two water droplets. Overall, all methods manage to retrieve reasonable results for all test cases presented. VOF, CLSVOF and ACLS tend to artificially create little structures while SLS suffers from conservation issues in the mesh resolution limit. This study leads us to the conclusion that CLSVOF is the most promising method for two-phase flow simulations in our specific framework because of its inherent conservation properties and topology accuracy.