Reconstruction of multi-material interfaces from moment data

Abstract

The moment-of-fluid (MoF) method is an extension of popular volume-of-fluid (VoF) technique for tracking material interface in multi-material fluid flows. VoF methods track the cell-wise material volumes and use these data for reconstructing the interfaces in mixed cell. The MoF method goes one step further and, in additional to the volumes, keeps track of the cell-wise material centroids; this approach provides sufficiently more information for the interface reconstruction algorithm. The MoF algorithm reconstructs interfaces in volume-conservative manner, by minimizing the defect of the 1st moment in each mixed cell. In case of two materials, this strategy allows to construct the linear interface in a mixed cell using no material volume data from the neighboring cells. Compared to the VoF interface reconstruction techniques, the MoF algorithm shows higher accuracy and better resolution, allows uniform processing of internal and boundary cells. In this paper we show how the same governing principle (minimization of the 1st-moment defect) can be used to reconstruct the interfaces in case of multiple materials.