On the combined effects of surface tension force calculation and interface advection on spurious currents within Volume of Fluid and Level Set frameworks

This paper deals with the comparison of Eulerian methods to take into account the capillary contribution in the vicinity of a fluid-fluid interface. Eulerian methods are well-known to produce additional vorticity close to the interface that leads to non-physical spurious currents. Numerical equilibrium between pressure gradient and capillary force for the static bubble test case within a VOF framework has been reached in [35] with the height-function technique [14,35]. However, once the bubble is translated in a uniform flow, spurious currents are maintained by slight errors induced by translation schemes. In this work, two main points are investigated: the ability of Volume of Fluid and Level Set methods to accurately calculate the curvature, and the magnitude of spurious currents due to errors in the calculation of the curvature after advection in both translating and rotating flows. The spurious currents source term is expressed from the vorticity equation and used to discuss and compare the methods. Simulations of gas-liquid Taylor flow at low capillary number show that the flow structure and the bubble velocity can be significantly affected by spurious currents. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.