Efficiently and consistently energy-stable L2-phase-field method for the incompressible ternary fluid problems

Ternary incompressible fluid flows extensively exist in atmospheric science, chemical engineering, and energy and power engineering, etc. The phase-field method is popular in multi-phase fluid modeling thanks to its efficient ability of interface capturing. This work aims to develop an energy dissipation law-preserving and temporally second-order accurate algorithm for a ternary phase-field fluid system. To establish a simple energy estimation, an adapted auxiliary variable approach is used to transform the original model into its equivalent form. Later, a second-order backward difference strategy is used to design the fully decoupled and linear time-marching scheme. To improve the consistency between original and modified discrete energy functionals, a practical energy correction technique is presented. We analytically prove the discrete energy dissipation property and show that the energy estimation can be easily established without considering the complex treatments of nonlinear and coupling terms. To facilitate the interested readers, we briefly describe the numerical implementation in each time step. The numerical tests indicate that the proposed method not only has desired accuracy, but also satisfies the energy stability even if a larger time step is used. Moreover, the proposed method can well simulate various ternary fluid phenomena, such as the liquid lens, phase separation, droplet dynamics, Kelvin–Helmholtz instability, and billowing cloud.