Free surface tension modelling using particle-grid hybrid method without considering gas particles

Abstract

In particle method, the number of particles is an important factor affecting the computational efficiency. For the free-surface flow, gas particles are usually necessary for surface tension calculation, but they have little impact to the liquid flow with a large density. If the free surface tension can be modeled without considering gas particles, it is of great significance to improve the computational efficiency. The existing potential-based surface tension model and the stress-based surface tension model don't need gas particles, but they have the problems of instability or are difficult to implement. Therefore, in this study, another free surface tension calculation method by coupling particles and grids is proposed. In the method, background mesh is applied to the entire computational domain, where the boundary of grid is extended outward by 3.1 l0 on the basis of particle boundary for curvature calculation. The level-set function is adopted to mark different phases on background mesh, whose value is set according to the normal distance between the grid and the nearest free surface particle. After obtaining the curvature and the level-set function gradient on background mesh, these variables are interpolated to corresponding particles to calculate the surface tension. Through the comparative study of area-weighted and distance-weighted interpolation schemes, it is found that the accuracy of distance-weighted interpolation scheme is higher than that of area-weighted interpolation scheme. Finally, the performance of the particle-grid hybrid method is verified by simulating four benchmark cases, including droplet oscillations, droplet spreading, capillary jet breakup and droplet impinging onto plate.