An adaptive solver for viscoelastic incompressible two-phase problems applied to the study of the splashing of weakly viscoelastic droplets

• Published in: Journal of non-Newtonian fluid mechanics Vol. 264; pp. 144 - 158
• Main Authors: López-Herrera, J.M., Popinet, S., Castrejón-Pita, A.A.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Amsterdam Elsevier B.V 01-02-2019; Elsevier BV; Elsevier
• Subjects: Computational fluid dynamics; Computer simulation; Fluid flow; Fluid mechanics; Incompressible flow; Mathematical models; Mathematics; Mechanics; Numerical Analysis; Physics; Robustness (mathematics); Solvers; Splashing; Tensors; Two dimensional flow; Two phase flow; Viscoelastic fluids; Viscoelasticity; Websites
• ISSN: 0377-0257; 1873-2631
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jnnfm.2018.10.012

•A VoF-time-splitting technique is described and released (http://www.basilisk.fr).•The splashing of viscoelastic droplets on solid and liquid substrates is studied.•Viscoelastic bulk effects are negligible in splashing on hard substrate.•On liquid substrate viscoelastic stresses alter the dynamic of the vortex shedding.
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We propose an adaptive numerical solver for the study of viscoelastic 2D two-phase flows using the volume-of-fluid method. The scheme uses the robust log conformation tensor technique of Fattal and Kupferman (2004, 2005) [1,2] combined with the time-split scheme proposed by Hao and Pan (2007) [3]. The use of such a time-split scheme has been proven to increase the stability of the numerical computation of two-phase flows. We show that the adaptive computational technique can be used to simulate viscoelastic flows efficiently. The solver is coded using the open-source libraries provided by the Basilisk (Popinet, 2018 [4]) platform. In particular, the method is implemented for Oldroyd-B type viscoelastic fluids and related models (FENE-P and FENE-CR). The numerical scheme is then used to study the splashing of weakly viscoelastic drops. The solvers and tests of this work are freely available on the Basilisk (Popinet, 2018 [4]) web site (Lopez-Herrera, 2018 [5]).