A fast mesh-free boundary integral method for two-phase flow with soluble surfactant

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fast, mesh-free boundary integral method for simulating two-phase flows with soluble surfactants, efficiently handling nonlinear surfactant dynamics and interface deformation in Stokes flow.

Contribution

It develops a novel, causal Fast Multipole Method for efficient evaluation of time convolutions in surfactant transport, enabling accurate simulations of complex two-phase flows.

Findings

Achieves $O(P \, \log_2^2 P)$ computational complexity per surface point.

Successfully simulates deforming drops and bubbles with soluble surfactant.

Extends to other high Péclet number advection-diffusion problems.

Abstract

We present an accurate and efficient boundary integral (BI) method for simulating the deformation of drops and bubbles in Stokes flow with soluble surfactant. Soluble surfactant advects and diffuses in bulk fluids while adsorbing and desorbing at interfaces. Since the fluid velocity is coupled to the surfactant concentration, the advection-diffusion equation governing the bulk surfactant concentration $C$ is nonlinear, precluding the Green's function formulation necessary for a BI method. However, in the physically representative large P\'eclet number limit, an analytical reduction of the surfactant dynamics permits a Green's function formulation for $C$ as an Abel-type time-convolution integral at each Lagrangian interface point. A challenge in developing a practical numerical method based on this formulation is the fast evaluation of the time convolution, since the kernel depends on the time history of quantities at the interface, which is only found during the time-stepping process. To address this, we develop a novel, causal version of the Fast Multipole Method that reduces the computational cost from $O(P^2)$ for direct evaluation of the time convolution to $O(P \log_2^2 P)$ per surface grid point, where $P$ is the number of time steps. In the bulk phase, the resulting method is mesh-free and provides an accurate solution to the fully coupled moving interface problem with soluble surfactant. The approach extends naturally to a broader class of advection-diffusion problems in the high P\'eclet number regime.