A novel momentum-conserving, mass-momentum consistent method for interfacial flows involving large density contrasts

We propose a novel method for the direct numerical simulation of interfacial flows involving large density contrasts, using a Volume-of-Fluid method. We employ the conservative formulation of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations for immiscible fluids in order to ensure consistency between the discrete transport of mass and momentum in both fluids. This strategy is implemented on a uniform 3D Cartesian grid with a staggered configuration of primitive variables, wherein a geometrical reconstruction based mass advection is carried out on a grid twice as fine as that for the momentum. The implementation is in the spirit of Rudman (1998) [41], coupled with the extension of the direction-split time integration scheme of Weymouth & Yue (2010) [46] to that of conservative momentum transport. The resulting numerical method ensures discrete consistency between the mass and momentum propagation, while simultaneously enforcing conservative numerical transport to arbitrary levels of precision in 3D. We present several quantitative comparisons with benchmarks from existing literature in order to establish the accuracy of the method, and henceforth demonstrate its stability and robustness in the context of a complex turbulent interfacial flow configuration involving a falling raindrop in air.

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