A ghost fluid method for sharp interface simulations of compressible multiphase flows

Abstract

A ghost fluid based computational tool is developed to study a wide range of compressible multiphase flows involving strong shocks and contact discontinuities while accounting for surface tension, viscous stresses and gravitational forces. The solver utilizes constrained reinitialization method to predict the interface configuration at each time step. Surface tension effect is handled via an exact interface Riemann problem solver. Interfacial viscous stresses are approximated by considering continuous velocity and viscous stress across the interface. To assess the performance of the solver several benchmark problems are considered: One-dimensional gas-water shock tube problem, shock-bubble interaction, air cavity collapse in water, underwater explosion, Rayleigh-Taylor Instability, and ellipsoidal drop oscillations. Results obtained from the numerical simulations indicate that the numerical methodology performs reasonably well in predicting flow features and exhibit a very good agreement with prior experimental and numerical observations. To further examine the accuracy of the developed ghost fluid solver, the obtained results are compared to those by a conventional diffuse interface solver. The comparison shows the capability of our ghost fluid method in reproducing the experimentally observed flow characteristics while revealing more details regarding topological changes of the interface.