TY - JOUR
T1 - Thickness-based adaptive mesh refinement methods for multi-phase flow simulations with thin regions
AU - Chen, Xiaodong
AU - Yang, Vigor
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was financially supported by the Army Research Office under the Multi-University Research Initiative under Contract No. W911NF-08-1-0124 . The support and encouragement provided by Dr. Ralph Anthenien are gratefully acknowledged. Special thanks is due to Dr. Stéphane Popinet for allowing us to use his work on the VOF and AMR algorithms in the Gerris code.
PY - 2014/7/15
Y1 - 2014/7/15
N2 - In numerical simulations of multi-scale, multi-phase flows, grid refinement is required to resolve regions with small scales. A notable example is liquid-jet atomization and subsequent droplet dynamics. It is essential to characterize the detailed flow physics with variable length scales with high fidelity, in order to elucidate the underlying mechanisms. In this paper, two thickness-based mesh refinement schemes are developed based on distance- and topology-oriented criteria for thin regions with confining wall/plane of symmetry and in any situation, respectively. Both techniques are implemented in a general framework with a volume-of-fluid formulation and an adaptive-mesh-refinement capability. The distance-oriented technique compares against a critical value, the ratio of an interfacial cell size to the distance between the mass center of the cell and a reference plane. The topology-oriented technique is developed from digital topology theories to handle more general conditions. The requirement for interfacial mesh refinement can be detected swiftly, without the need of thickness information, equation solving, variable averaging or mesh repairing. The mesh refinement level increases smoothly on demand in thin regions. The schemes have been verified and validated against several benchmark cases to demonstrate their effectiveness and robustness. These include the dynamics of colliding droplets, droplet motions in a microchannel, and atomization of liquid impinging jets. Overall, the thickness-based refinement technique provides highly adaptive meshes for problems with thin regions in an efficient and fully automatic manner.
AB - In numerical simulations of multi-scale, multi-phase flows, grid refinement is required to resolve regions with small scales. A notable example is liquid-jet atomization and subsequent droplet dynamics. It is essential to characterize the detailed flow physics with variable length scales with high fidelity, in order to elucidate the underlying mechanisms. In this paper, two thickness-based mesh refinement schemes are developed based on distance- and topology-oriented criteria for thin regions with confining wall/plane of symmetry and in any situation, respectively. Both techniques are implemented in a general framework with a volume-of-fluid formulation and an adaptive-mesh-refinement capability. The distance-oriented technique compares against a critical value, the ratio of an interfacial cell size to the distance between the mass center of the cell and a reference plane. The topology-oriented technique is developed from digital topology theories to handle more general conditions. The requirement for interfacial mesh refinement can be detected swiftly, without the need of thickness information, equation solving, variable averaging or mesh repairing. The mesh refinement level increases smoothly on demand in thin regions. The schemes have been verified and validated against several benchmark cases to demonstrate their effectiveness and robustness. These include the dynamics of colliding droplets, droplet motions in a microchannel, and atomization of liquid impinging jets. Overall, the thickness-based refinement technique provides highly adaptive meshes for problems with thin regions in an efficient and fully automatic manner.
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U2 - 10.1016/j.jcp.2014.02.035
DO - 10.1016/j.jcp.2014.02.035
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84897464622
SN - 0021-9991
VL - 269
SP - 22
EP - 39
JO - Journal of Computational Physics
JF - Journal of Computational Physics
ER -