Enforcing accurate volume conservation in VOF-based long-term simulations of turbulent bubble-laden flows on coarse grids

Abstract

This study proposes two different strategies to enforce accurate volume conservation in volume-of-fluid (VOF)-based simulations of turbulent bubble-laden flows on coarse grids. It is demonstrated that, without a correction, minimal volume errors on a time-step level, caused by the under-resolution of the interface, can accumulate to significant deviations from the intended flow conditions despite the comparably good volume conservation properties of the geometric VOF method. In particular, large volume errors are observed for challenging setups combining coarse grid resolutions and comparably high Reynolds and Eötvös numbers. The problem is reinforced for long-term simulations in periodic domains, which are often performed to collect flow statistics of bubbly flows. The first proposed volume conservation method simply corrects the volume error of a bubble by uniformly adding or removing the respective amount of gas volume in the interface cells. The second proposed method performs an additional reconstruction and advection step of the VOF field using a non-divergence-free velocity field, which can be interpreted as a slight dilatation or contraction of the bubble. A comparison between the global flow statistics as well as the individual bubble dynamics for both volume conservation methods reveals that the results are quasi-identical for a number of challenging test cases, while the gas volume is accurately conserved. The proposed methods allow to perform numerical simulations of freely deformable bubbles in turbulent flows for setups that have previously been out of reach for this numerical framework.