No Arabic abstract
Crashing ocean waves, cappuccino froths and microfluidic bubble crystals are examples of foamy flows. Foamy flows are critical in numerous natural and industrial processes and remain notoriously difficult to compute as they involve coupled, multiscale physical processes. Computations need to resolve the interactions of the bubbles with the fluid and complex boundaries, while capturing the drainage and rupture of the microscopic liquid films at their interface. We present a novel multilayer simulation framework (Multi-VOF) that advances the state of the art in simulation capabilities of foamy flows. The framework introduces a novel scheme for the distinct handling of multiple neighboring bubbles and a new regularization method that produces sharp interfaces and removes spurious fragments. Multi-VOF is verified and validated with experimental results and complemented with open source, efficient scalable software. We demonstrate capturing of bubble crystalline structures in realistic microfluidics devices and foamy flows involving tens of thousands of bubbles in a waterfall. The present multilayer framework extends the classical volume-of-fluid methodology and allows for unprecedented large scale, predictive simulations of flows with multiple interfaces.
We present an $rp$-adaptation strategy for high-fidelity simulation of compressible inviscid flows with shocks. The mesh resolution in regions of flow discontinuities is increased by using a variational optimiser to $r$-adapt the mesh and cluster degrees of freedom there. In regions of smooth flow, we locally increase or decrease the local resolution through increasing or decreasing the polynomial order of the elements, respectively. This dual approach allows us to take advantage of the strengths of both methods for best computational performance, thereby reducing the overall cost of the simulation. The adaptation workflow uses a sensor for both discontinuities and smooth regions that is cheap to calculate, but the framework is general and could be used in conjunction with other feature-based sensors or error estimators. We demonstrate this proof-of-concept using two geometries at transonic and supersonic flow regimes. The method has been implemented in the open-source spectral/$hp$ element framework $Nektar++$, and its dedicated high-order mesh generation tool $NekMesh$. The results show that the proposed $rp$-adaptation methodology is a reasonably cost-effective way of improving accuracy.
This paper presents a topology optimization approach for surface flows, which can represent the viscous and incompressible fluidic motions at the solid/liquid and liquid/vapor interfaces. The fluidic motions on such material interfaces can be described by the surface Navier-Stokes equations defined on 2-manifolds or two-dimensional manifolds, where the elementary tangential calculus is implemented in terms of exterior differential operators expressed in a Cartesian system. Based on the topology optimization model for fluidic flows with porous medium filling the design domain, an artificial Darcy friction is added to the area force term of the surface Navier-Stokes equations and the physical area forces are penalized to eliminate their existence in the fluidic regions and to avoid the invalidity of the porous medium model. Topology optimization for steady and unsteady surface flows can be implemented by iteratively evolving the impermeability of the porous medium on the 2-manifolds, where the impermeability is interpolated by the material density derived from a design variable. The related partial differential equations are solved by using the surface finite element method. Numerical examples have been provided to demonstrate this topology optimization approach for surface flows, including the boundary velocity driven flows, area force driven flows and convection-diffusion flows.
We investigate the ability of discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods to simulate under-resolved turbulent flows in large-eddy simulation. The role of the Riemann solver and the subgrid-scale model in the prediction of a variety of flow regimes, including transition to turbulence, wall-free turbulence and wall-bounded turbulence, are examined. Numerical and theoretical results show the Riemann solver in the DG scheme plays the role of an implicit subgrid-scale model and introduces numerical dissipation in under-resolved turbulent regions of the flow. This implicit model behaves like a dynamic model and vanishes for flows that do not contain subgrid scales, such as laminar flows, which is a critical feature to accurately predict transition to turbulence. In addition, for the moderate-Reynolds-number turbulence problems considered, the implicit model provides a more accurate representation of the actual subgrid scales in the flow than state-of-the-art explicit eddy viscosity models, including dynamic Smagorinsky, WALE and Vreman. The results in this paper indicate new best practices for subgrid-scale modeling are needed with high-order DG methods.
It is well known that domain-decomposition-based multiscale mixed methods rely on interface spaces, defined on the skeleton of the decomposition, to connect the solution among the non-overlapping subdomains. Usual spaces, such as polynomial-based ones, cannot properly represent high-contrast channelized features such as fractures (high permeability) and barriers (low permeability) for flows in heterogeneous porous media. We propose here new interface spaces, which are based on physics, to deal with permeability fields in the simultaneous presence of fractures and barriers, accommodated respectively, by the pressure and flux spaces. Existing multiscale methods based on mixed formulations can take advantage of the proposed interface spaces, however, in order to present and test our results, we use the newly developed Multiscale Robin Coupled Method (MRCM) [Guiraldello, et al., J. Comput. Phys., 355 (2018) pp. 1-21], which generalizes most well-known multiscale mixed methods, and allows for the independent choice of the pressure and flux interface spaces. An adaptive version of the MRCM [Rocha, et al., J. Comput. Phys., 409 (2020), 109316] is considered that automatically selects the physics-based pressure space for fractured structures and the physics-based flux space for regions with barriers, resulting in a procedure with unprecedented accuracy. The features of the proposed approach are investigated through several numerical simulations of single-phase and two-phase flows, in different heterogeneous porous media. The adaptive MRCM combined with the interface spaces based on physics provides promising results for challenging problems with the simultaneous presence of fractures and barriers.
We present an unconditionally energy-stable scheme for approximating the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations on domains with outflow/open boundaries. The scheme combines the generalized Positive Auxiliary Variable (gPAV) approach and a rotational velocity-correction type strategy, and the adoption of the auxiliary variable simplifies the numerical treatment for the open boundary conditions. The discrete energy stability of the proposed scheme has been proven, irrespective of the time step sizes. Within each time step the scheme entails the computation of two velocity fields and two pressure fields, by solving an individual de-coupled Helmholtz (including Poisson) type equation with a constant pre-computable coefficient matrix for each of these field variables. The auxiliary variable, being a scalar number, is given by a well-defined explicit formula within a time step, which ensures the positivity of its computed values. Extensive numerical experiments with several flows involving outflow/open boundaries in regimes where the backflow instability becomes severe have been presented to test the performance of the proposed method and to demonstrate its stability at large time step sizes.