Development of a free surface flow solver using the Ghost Fluid Method on OpenFOAM

Abstract

This study is devoted to the development of a VoF/GFM solver using the open source CFD library OpenFOAM. An industrial point of view is adopted in this paper, meaning that simulations are run with large CFL conditions. Weaknesses of the standard OpenFOAM VoF solver interFoam are identified (free surface wiggles and light phase accelerations). Using available literature, MULES algorithm has been abandoned to the profits of algebraic schemes (HRIC, MHRIC, MCICSAM) and the Ghost Fluid Method (GFM, Fedkiw et al. (1999)) has been adopted for dealing with free surface discontinuity. The resulting solver called marineFoam is tested and compared to interFoam on the following test cases : 3D wave impact on a tall structure (dam break) (Gomez-Gesteira, 2013), periodic wave propagation simulation (Larsen et al., 2019), model and full-scale ship resistance simulations (Larsson et al., 2014; Tokyo Workshop, 2015; Lloyd’s Register, 2016). marineFoam can allow large CFL numbers while avoiding free surface wiggles and most of spurious currents. interFoam achieves reliable results but requires additional VoF sub-cycle iterations or a shorter time step.