An embedded boundary method for soluble surfactants with interface tracking for two-phase flows

Abstract

Surfactants, surface reacting agents, lower the surface tension of the interface between fluids in multiphase flow. This capability of surfactants makes them ideal for many applications, including wetting, foaming, and dispersing. Due to their molecular composition, surfactants are adsorbed from the bulk fluid to the interface between the fluids, leading to different concentrations on the interface and in the fluid.In a previous paper [21], we introduced a new second order method using uniform grids to simulate insoluble surfactants in multiphase flow. This method used Strang splitting allowing for a fully second order treatment in time. Here, we use the same numerical methods to explicitly represent the singular interface, treat the interfacial surfactant concentration, and couple with the Navier–Stokes equations. Now, we introduce a second order method for the surfactants in the bulk that continues to allow the use of regular grids for the full problem. Difficulties arise since the boundary condition for the bulk concentration, which handles the flux of surfactant between the interface and bulk fluid, is applied at the interface which cuts arbitrarily through the regular grid. We extend the embedded boundary method, introduced in [22], to handle this challenge.Through our results, we present the effect of the solubility of the surfactants. We show results of drop dynamics due to resulting Marangoni stresses and of drop deformations in shear flow in the presence of soluble surfactants. There is a large nondimensional parameter space over which we try to understand the drop dynamics.