Numerical study of droplet deformation in shear flow using a conservative level-set method

Abstract

Abstract This paper is concerned with a numerical study on the behavior of a single Newtonian droplet suspended in another Newtonian fluid, all subjected to a simple shear flow. Conservative finite-volume approximation on a collocated three-dimensional grid along with a conservative Level-set method are used to solve the governing equations. Four parameters of capillary number (Ca), Viscosity ratio ( λ ), Reynolds number (Re) and walls confinement ratio are used to physically define the problem. The main focus of the current study is to investigate the effect of viscosity on walls critical confinement ratio. In this paper, the phrase critical is used to specify a state of governing parameters in which divides the parameter space into the subcritical and supercritical regions where droplets attain a steady shape or breakup, respectively. To do so, first, we validate the ability of proposed method on capturing the physics of droplet deformation including: steady-state subcritical deformation of non-confined droplet, breakup of supercritical conditioned droplet, steady-state deformation of moderate confined droplet, subcritical oscillation of highly-confined droplet, and the effect of viscosity ratio on deformation of the droplet. The extracted results are compared with available experimental, analytical and numerical data from the literature. Afterward, for a constant capillary number of 0.3 and a low Reynolds number of 1.0, subcritical (steady-state) and supercritical (breakup) deformations of the droplet for a wide range of walls confinement in different viscosity ratios are studied. The results indicate the existence of two steady-state regions in a viscosity ratio-walls confinement ratio graph which are separated by a breakup region.