A dual resolution phase-field solver for wetting of viscoelastic droplets

TL;DR

This paper introduces a dual-resolution phase-field solver for simulating wetting of viscoelastic droplets, improving computational efficiency while maintaining accuracy by using finer meshes at the interface.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel dual-resolution strategy for phase-field modeling of viscoelastic fluids with moving contact lines, enhancing efficiency without sacrificing accuracy.

Findings

Nearly identical results to high-resolution methods.

Significant computational time savings in 3D simulations.

Validated against experimental and numerical data.

Abstract

We present a new and efficient phase-field solver for viscoelastic fluids with moving contact line based on a dual-resolution strategy. The interface between two immiscible fluids is tracked by using the Cahn-Hilliard phase-field model, and the viscoelasticity incorporated into the phase-field framework. The main challenge of this approach is to have enough resolution at the interface to approach the sharp-interface methods. The method presented here addresses this problem by solving the phase field variable on a mesh twice as fine as that used for the velocities, pressure, and polymer-stress constitutive equations. The method is based on second-order finite differences for the discretization of the fully coupled Navier-Stokes, polymeric constitutive and Cahn-Hilliard equations, and it is implemented in a 2D pencil-like domain decomposition to benefit from existing highly-scalable parallel algorithms. A FFT-based solver is used for the Helmholtz and Poisson equations with different global sizes. The splitting method proposed by previous authors is used to impose the dynamic contact angle boundary conditions in the case of large density and viscosity ratios. The implementation is validated against experimental data and previous numerical studies in 2D and 3D. The results indicate that the dual-resolution approach produces nearly identical results while saving computational time for both Newtonian and viscoelastic flows in 3D.