English

Simulating two-phase flows with thermodynamically consistent energy stable Cahn-Hilliard Navier-Stokes equations on parallel adaptive octree based meshes

Numerical Analysis 2020-06-24 v3 Numerical Analysis Computational Physics Fluid Dynamics

Abstract

We report on simulations of two-phase flows with deforming interfaces at various density contrasts by solving thermodynamically consistent Cahn-Hilliard Navier-Stokes equations. An (essentially) unconditionally energy-stable Crank-Nicolson-type time integration scheme is used. Detailed proofs of energy stability of the semi-discrete scheme and for the existence of solutions of the advective-diffusive Cahn-Hilliard operator are provided. In space we discretize with a conforming continuous Galerkin finite element method in conjunction with a residual-based variational multi-scale (VMS) approach in order to provide pressure stabilization. We deploy this approach on a massively parallel numerical implementation using fast octree-based adaptive meshes. A detailed scaling analysis of the solver is presented. Numerical experiments showing convergence and validation with experimental results from the literature are presented for a large range of density ratios.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1912.12453,
  title  = {Simulating two-phase flows with thermodynamically consistent energy stable Cahn-Hilliard Navier-Stokes equations on parallel adaptive octree based meshes},
  author = {Makrand A Khanwale and Alec D. Lofquist and Hari Sundar and James A. Rossmanith and Baskar Ganapathysubramanian},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1912.12453},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

59 pages, 22 figures, submitted to Journal of Computational Physics; Version accepted by the journal

R2 v1 2026-06-23T12:58:00.521Z