A structure--preserving ALE--BGN--MDR method for Navier--Stokes free boundary problems with moving contact lines and gravity
We propose a gravity-consistent arbitrary Lagrangian--Eulerian finite element method for incompressible Navier--Stokes free-boundary problems with moving contact lines. A direct body-force discretization of gravity may fail to ensure consistency between the discrete gravitational work and the variation of the gravitational potential energy on the evolving domain, resulting in an artificial consistency error and persistent spurious velocities near equilibrium. To remove this inconsistency, we reformulate the gravitational potential energy variation as a moving-boundary integral over intermediate ALE configurations and evaluate it exactly using Simpson's quadrature rule. This leads to a mildly nonlinear fully discrete scheme in which the gravitational contribution is exactly consistent with the discrete potential-energy variation. The proposed method preserves volume exactly, satisfies a discrete energy-dissipation law including gravitational potential energy, and under suitable assumptions, drives the discrete velocity to zero in the long-time regime, thereby excluding persistent gravity-induced spurious velocities. Together with the BGN treatment of the free surface and the MDR bulk mesh extension, the scheme maintains accurate interface tracking and good mesh quality near the moving contact line. Numerical experiments in two and three spatial dimensions confirm the theoretical properties.