Inconsistencies in Unstructured Geometric Volume-of-Fluid Methods for Two-Phase Flows with High Density Ratios

Abstract

Geometric flux-based Volume-of-Fluid (VOF) methods are widely considered consistent in handling two-phase flows with high density ratios. However, although the conservation of mass and momentum is consistent for two-phase incompressible single-field Navier-Stokes equations without phase-change, discretization may easily introduce small inconsistencies that result in very large errors or catastrophic failure. We apply the consistency conditions derived for the unstructured Level Set / Front Tracking method to flux-based geometric VOF methods, and implement our discretization into the plicRDF-isoAdvector geometrical VOF method. We find that computing the mass flux by scaling the geometrically computed fluxed phase-specific volume destroys the equivalence between the scaled volume fraction equation and the mass conservation equation, depending on the choice for the temporal and convective term discretization schemes. We propose two solutions. First, based on the analysis of discretization errors, we suggest a consistent combination of the temporal discretization scheme and the interpolation scheme for the momentum convection term. Second, similar to our previous work on the unstructured Level Set / Front Tracking method, we solve an auxiliary mass conservation equation with a geometrical calculation of the face-centered density. We prove the equivalence between these two approaches mathematically and verify and validate their numerical stability for density ratios in the range $[1,10^6]$ and viscosity ratios in the range $[10^2,10^5]$.