A fast massively parallel two-phase flow solver for microfluidic chip simulation

This work presents a parallel finite element solver of incompressible two-phase flow targeting large-scale simulations of three-dimensional dynamics in high-throughput microfluidic separation devices. The method relies on a conservative level set formulation for representing the fluid-fluid interface and uses adaptive mesh refinement on forests of octrees. An implicit time stepping with efficient block solvers for the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations discretized with Taylor-Hood and augmented Taylor-Hood finite elements is presented. A matrix-free implementation is used that reduces the solution time for the Navier-Stokes system by a factor of approximately three compared to the best matrix-based algorithms. Scalability of the chosen algorithms up to 32,768 cores and a billion degrees of freedom is shown.