A study on the extension of a VOF/PLIC based method to a curvilinear co-ordinate system

  • Authors:

  • W. Jang;J. Jilesen;F. S. Lien;H. Ji

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ont., Canada;Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ont., Canada;Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ont., Canada;Waterloo CFD Engineering Consulting Inc., Waterloo, ON, Canada

  • Venue:
  • International Journal of Computational Fluid Dynamics
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

The conventional volume-of-fluid method has the potential to deal with large free surface deformation on a fixed Cartesian grid. However, when free-surface flows are within or over complex geometries of industrial relevance, such as free-surface flows over offshore oil platforms, it is advantageous to extend the method originally written in Cartesian forms into non-Cartesian forms. In the present study, an algorithm similar to the algorithm described by Rudman in 1997 is proposed for use with curvilinear co-ordinates. This extension results in the ability to model complex geometries which could not be modelled using the original algorithm. Excellent agreement between the solutions obtained on both orthogonal and non-orthogonal meshes is achieved, although in general the L1 error, based on the exact solution, on the non-orthogonal mesh is slightly higher than that on the orthogonal mesh. The extended fluid flow solving capacity of the present method is demonstrated through its application to a non-orthogonal Rayleigh-Taylor instability problem.