Michael Dodd

A fast pressure-correction method for incompressible two-fluid flows

We have developed a new pressure-correction method for simulating incompressible two-fluid flows with large density and viscosity ratios. The methods main advantage is that the variable coefficient Poisson equation that arises in solving the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations for two-fluid flows is reduced to a constant coefficient equation, which can be solved with an FFT-based, fast Poisson solver. This reduction is achieved by splitting the variable density pressure gradient term in the governing equations. The validity of this splitting is demonstrated from our numerical tests, and it is explained from a physical viewpoint. In this paper, the new pressure-correction method is coupled with a mass-conserving volume-of-fluid method to capture the motion of the interface between the two fluids but, in general, it could be coupled with other interface advection methods such as level-set, phase-field, or front-tracking. First, we verified the new pressure-correction method using the capillary wave test-case up to density and viscosity ratios of 10,000. Then, we validated the method by simulating the motion of a falling water droplet in air and comparing the droplet terminal velocity with an experimental value. Next, the method is shown to be second-order accurate in space and time independent of the VoF method, and it conserves mass, momentum, and kinetic energy in the inviscid limit. Also, we show that for solving the two-fluid Navier-Stokes equations, the method is 10-40 times faster than the standard pressure-correction method, which uses multigrid to solve the variable coefficient Poisson equation. Finally, we show that the method is capable of performing fully-resolved direct numerical simulation (DNS) of droplet-laden isotropic turbulence with thousands of droplets using a computational mesh of 1024^3 points.