Enhanced Level-Set Method for free surface flow applications

Abstract

This publication presents a solver using the Level-Set method (Sussman et al., 1994) for incompressible two phase flows with surface tension. A one fluid approach is adopted where both phases share the same velocity and pressure field. The Ghost Fluid Method (Fedkiw et al., 1999) is also used. An efficient and pragmatic solution is proposed to avoid interface displacement during the reinitialization of the Level-Set field. A solver called LSFoam is created in the OpenFOAM (Weller et al., 1998) framework with a consistent Rhie & Chow interpolation (Cubero and Fueyo, 2007). This solver is tested on several test cases, covering different scales and flow configurations: rising bubble test case, Hysing et al. (2007), Rayleigh–Taylor instability simulations (Puckett et al., 1997), Ogee spillway flow (Erpicum et al., 2018), 3D dambreak simulation with a square cylinder obstacle (Gomez-Gesteira, 2013) and KVLCC2 steady resistance calculations (Larsson et al., 2014). Overall results are in excellent agreement with reference data and the present approach is very promising for moderate free surface deformations.