Accurate and Efficient Coupled Surfactant Calculations for Two-Phase Flows with the Discrete Exterior Calculus

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Michael Griebel
• Subject Area: Mathematics
• Term: from 2013 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 238012092

In this project, we will develop a new, robust, accurate and GPU-parallelized solver for two-phase flow problems with surfactants on the free surface. Based on our existing solver NaSt3DGPF, we will apply an explicit mesh construction method for the fluid/fluid interface which performs smooth sub-cell sampling in a generalization of the marching cubes algorithm. A key feature is then the Discrete Exterior Calculus (DEC) which will be employed on the interface mesh for the numerical treatment of the surfactant-PDE, the calculation of the surface tension and the coupling of the interface-PDE to the bulk equations with significantly different densities. Together with a sharp interface capturing bulk discretization, DEC promises to obtain stability, robustness and improved accuracy for the surfactant equations on the interface, the surface tension calculations and the bulk quantities even close to the interface. We furthermore will parallelize the new approach for a cluster of GPU compute nodes to obtain a fast simulation tool for (Taylor) bubble problems and droplet breakup in shear driven flows in the presence of surfactants.

• DFG Programme: Priority Programmes
• Subproject of: SPP 1506: Transport Processes at Fluidic Interfaces