Numerical wetting benchmarks -- advancing the plicRDF-isoAdvector unstructured Volume-of-Fluid (VOF) method

TL;DR

This paper verifies and validates the plicRDF-isoAdvector unstructured VOF method for simulating wetting phenomena, demonstrating high accuracy and computational efficiency through various benchmark tests and making resources publicly available.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive verification and validation of the plicRDF-isoAdvector method for wetting, including benchmark datasets and tools for further research.

Findings

High accuracy in interface advection near walls

Excellent agreement with reference solutions for droplet spreading

Successful benchmark comparison for 2D capillary rise

Abstract

The numerical simulation of wetting and dewetting of geometrically complex surfaces benefits from unstructured numerical methods because they discretize the domain with second-order accuracy. A recently developed unstructured geometric Volume-of-Fluid (VOF) method, the plicRDF-isoAdvector method, is chosen to investigate wetting processes because of its volume conservation property and high computational efficiency. The present work verifies and validates the plicRDF-isoAdvector method for wetting problems. We present four verification studies. The first study investigates the accuracy of the interface advection near walls. The method is further investigated for the spreading of droplets on a flat and a spherical surface, respectively, for which excellent agreement with the reference solutions is obtained. Furthermore, a 2D capillary rise is considered, and a benchmark comparison based on results from previous work is performed. The benchmark suite, input data, and Jupyter Notebooks used in this study are publicly available to facilitate further research and comparison with other numerical codes.