Efficient formulation of scale separation for multi-scale modeling of interfacial flows

We propose an efficient formulation of the scale-separation approach which has been developed by Han et al. [10] for multi-scale sharp interface modeling of multi-phase flows based on the level-set technique. Instead of shifting the entire level-set field twice as in the original method, the improved method identifies the non-resolved interface structures from two auxiliary level-sets close to the interface. Non-resolved structures are separated from the interface by a localized re-distancing method, which increases the computational efficiency considerably compared to the original global reinitialization procedure. Several tests for two-phase flow problems, involving simple and complex interface structures, are carried out to show that the present method maintains sharper interface structures than the original method, and achieves effective scale-separation. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.