Grand-potential phase field simulations of droplet growth and sedimentation in a two-phase ternary fluid

TL;DR

This paper presents a high-performance, GPU-accelerated phase field simulation framework for modeling droplet growth, sedimentation, and coarsening in ternary fluids, capturing complex dynamics including flow effects.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, efficient simulation methodology combining phase field and lattice Boltzmann methods for ternary fluids with arbitrary phase diagrams.

Findings

Accurate benchmark against analytic solutions.

Reproduction of classical droplet coarsening power law.

Simulation of flow effects on sedimentation and coalescence.

Abstract

A methodology is built to model and simulate the dynamics of domain coarsening of a two-phase ternary liquid with an arbitrary phase diagram. High numerical performance is obtained through the use of the phase field-method for interface capturing, a lattice Boltzmann method numerical scheme for all the model equations, and a portable, parallel simulation code running on multiple GPUs. The model is benchmarked against an analytic solution for a ternary diffusion couple. It also reproduces the well-known power law for droplet coarsening during Ostwald ripening without fluid flow. Large-scale simulations with flow illustrate the effects of momentum transport and buoyancy, as well as droplet coalescence and sedimentation.