interPlicFoam

⚠️ IMPORTANT ⚠️ The latest interPlicFoam is available at geometricVofExt.

Introduction

interPlicFoam is a two-phase flow solver derived from interFoam for two incompressible, isothermal and immiscible fluids using the PLIC-VOF method. The fraction advecting follows the algorithms developed in isoAdvector. The interface inside a mixed polygonal/polyhedral cell is approximated with an orientated plane which defined as:

where is the unit orientation vector, arbitrary point on the plane and the signed distance.

In the interface reconstruction step, the unit orientation vector is evaluated by using the gradient of alpha field. Then the signed distance is computed by employing the Standard algorithm developed in:

Dezhi Dai and Albert Y. Tong (2019). "Analytical interface reconstruction algorithms in the PLIC‐VOF method for 3D polyhedral unstructured meshes." International Journal for Numerical Methods in Fluids.

Compatibility

The source code of interPlicFoam is developed and maintained for the latest OpenFOAM-plus release (currently OpenFOAM-v1812). A script for generating code for other releases and old versions will be provided in the near future.

Please notify me via the email address below if you found any errors or bugs, and I will fix them as soon as possible.

Installation

Before compiling interPlicFoam, make sure that the OpenFOAM environment has been set properly.

Download interPlicFoam from this page
Build libplicVofSolving.so

cd plic
wmake libso

Build interPlicFoam

cd ..
wmake

All of the compiling commands above have been integrated into Allwmake script.

Usage

The usage of interPlicFoam is similar with interFoam, however, two extra settings should be considered for interPlicFoam:

gradSchemes of alpha.water (alpha1) field (used for computing interface orientation vectors), e.g.,

gradSchemes
{
    default             Gauss linear;
    gradAlpha           Gauss pointLinear;
}

solvers of alpha.water (alpha1) field, i.e.,

"alpha.water.*"
{
    surfCellTol         1e-8;   // Tolerance for marking mixed cells
    nAlphaBounds        3;      // Number of alpha bounding steps
    snapTol             1e-8;   // Tolerance of fraction value snapping
    clip                true;   // Switch of fraction value clipping
    smoothedAlphaGrad   false;  // Switch of smoothed alpha gradient

    writePlicFaces      true;   // Switch of reconstructed interface outputting

    nAlphaSubCycles     1;      // Number of alpha sub-cycles

    // Note: cAlpha is not used by interPlicFoam but must
    // be specified because interfacePropertes object
    // reads it during construction.
    cAlpha              1;
}

Demos

Two dam-breaking tutorial cases are available in http://dx.doi.org/10.17632/wm5w5g3kzt.1 (damBreak.tar.gz and damBreakKleefsman.tar.gz).

It should be noted that damBreakKleefsmanFull.tar.gz is the numerical simulation results associated with the paper https://doi.org/10.1002/fld.4750.