A general pressure equation based method for incompressible two-phase flows

Abstract

We present a fully-explicit, iteration-free, weakly-compressible method to simulate immiscible incompressible two-phase flows. To update pressure, we circumvent the computationally expensive Poisson equation and use the general pressure equation which is solved explicitly. In addition, a less diffusive algebraic volume-of-fluid approach is used as the interface capturing technique and in order to facilitate improved parallel computing scalability, the technique is discretised temporally using the operator-split methodology. Our method is fully-explicit and stable with simple local spatial discretization, and hence, it is easy to implement. Several two- and three-dimensional canonical two-phase flows are simulated. The qualitative and quantitative results prove that our method is capable of accurately handling problems involving a range of density and viscosity ratios and surface tension effects.