Development of a hybrid particle-mesh method for two-phase flow simulations

Abstract

A hybrid particle-mesh method was developed for efficient and accurate simulations of two-phase flows. In this method, the main component of the flow is solved using the constrained interpolated profile/multi-moment finite volumemethod; the two-phase interface is rendered using the finite volume particle (FVP) method. The effect of surface tension is evaluated using the continuum surface force model. Numerical particles in the FVP method are distributed only on the surface of the liquid in simulating the interface between liquid and gas; these particles are used to determine the density of each mesh grid. An artificial term was also introduced to mitigate particle clustering in the direction of maximum compression and sparse discretization errors in the stretched direction. This enables accurate interface tracking without diminishing numerical efficiency. Two benchmark simulations are used to demonstrate the validity of the method developed and its numerical stability. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.