Numerical study on water-air two-phase flow based on WENO-THINC/WLIC model

Water-air two-phase flow can be found in many practical engineering projects in various fields. To simulate water-air two-phase flow with high accuracy has always been a challenging problem and a highlight in the realm of computational fluid dynamics. Based on the assumption that both water and air can be considered as incompressible fluid, for free surface flow in open water areas, the WENO-THINC/WLIC model for water-air two-phase flow is therefore established. In the developed model, the fifth-order accurate weighted essentially non-oscillation (WENO) scheme is used to solve the Navier-Stokes equation for fluid flows, and the improved multi-dimensional tangent of hyperbola for interface capturing scheme with weighted line interface calculation method (THINC/WLIC) is adopted to track the interface. The fractional step method is applied to discretize and solve the governing equations, the pressure projection method is adopted to compute the pressure field, and the third-order accurate total variation diminishing (TVD) Runge-Kutta (RK) method is used to discretize the temporal terms. In order to verify the model, it is applied to simulate two benchmarks of interface evolution subjected to an external velocity field, Zalesak's disk and shearing vortex, the linear sloshing, and the dambreaking flow problem. Through comparison of the simulated results with the analytical or experimental ones, adaptability and accuracy of the water-air two-phase model are discussed. The analysis indicates that the simulation outputs are in good accordance with theoretical or experimental results, which means the model is capable to simulate incompressible water-air two-phase flows. With the further improved WENO schemes and THINC schemes, more precise prediction results for water-air two phase flow problems can be achieved with the proposed combined WENO-THINC model. © 2021, Chinese Journal of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics Press. All right reserved.