Implementation of integral surface tension formulations in a volume of fluid framework and their applications to Marangoni flows

TL;DR

This paper extends integral surface tension formulations to a volume of fluid (VOF) framework, introducing three schemes for interface property calculation, and evaluates their accuracy and computational efficiency in modeling Marangoni flows.

Contribution

It develops and compares three novel VOF-based schemes for integral surface tension modeling, enhancing accuracy and efficiency in multiphase flow simulations.

Findings

CLSVOF has the least numerical oscillations in accuracy.

HF method is the fastest computationally.

HF2D offers a balance between speed and accuracy.

Abstract

Accurate numerical modeling of surface tension has been a challenging aspect of multiphase flow simulations. The integral formulation for modeling surface tension forces is known to be consistent and conservative, and to be a natural choice for the simulation of flows driven by surface tension gradients along the interface. This formulation was introduced by Popinet and Zaleski [1] for a front-tracking method and was later extended to level set methods by Al-Saud et al. [2]. In this work, we extend the integral formulation to a volume of fluid (VOF) method for capturing the interface. In fact, we propose three different schemes distinguished by the way we calculate the geometric properties of the interface, namely curvature, tangent vector and surface fraction from VOF representation. We propose a coupled level set volume of fluid (CLSVOF) method in which we use a signed distance function coupled with VOF, a height function (HF) method in which we use the height functions calculated from VOF, and a height function to distance (HF2D) method in which we use a sign-distance function calculated from height functions. For validation, these methods are rigorously tested for several problems with constant as well as varying surface tension. It is found that from an accuracy standpoint, CLSVOF has the least numerical oscillations followed by HF2D and then HF. However, from a computational speed point of view, HF method is the fastest followed by HF2D and then CLSVOF. Therefore, the HF2D method is a good compromise between speed and accuracy for obtaining faster and correct results. Keywords: Multiphase flows; Surface tension modeling; Marangoni flows