Multi‐material incompressible flow simulation using the moment‐of‐fluid method

Abstract

AbstractThis paper compares the numerical performance of the moment‐of‐fluid (MOF) interface reconstruction technique with Youngs, LVIRA, power diagram (PD), and Swartz interface reconstruction techniques in the context of a volume‐of‐fluid (VOF) based finite element projection method for the numerical simulation of variable‐density incompressible viscous flows. In pure advection tests with multiple materials MOF shows dramatic improvements in accuracy compared with the other methods. In incompressible flows where density differences determine the flow evolution, all the methods perform similarly for two material flows on structured grids. On unstructured grids, the second‐order MOF, LVIRA, and Swartz methods perform similarly and show improvement over the first‐order Youngs' and PD methods. For flow simulations with more than two materials, MOF shows increased accuracy in interface positions on coarse meshes. In most cases, the convergence and accuracy of the computed flow solution was not strongly affected by interface reconstruction method. Published in 2009 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.