Three-dimensional cellwise conservative unsplit geometric VOF schemes

This work presents two unsplit geometric VOF schemes that extend the two-dimensional cellwise conservative unsplit (CCU) scheme (Comminal et al. (2015) [49]) to three dimensions. The novelty of the 3D-CCU schemes lies in the representation of the streaksurfaces of donating regions by polyhedral surfaces whose vertices are calculated with the 4th order Runge-Kutta scheme. Moreover, the advected liquid volumes are computed using a truncation algorithm (Lopez et al. (2019) [62]) suited for arbitrary non-convex and self-intersecting polyhedra, which removes the need for tetrahedral decomposition. The 3D-CCU advection schemes were coupled to three interface reconstruction methods (Youngs' method, the Mixed Youngs-Centered scheme, and the Least-Square Fit algorithm). The resulting VOF methods were tested in classical benchmark advection tests, including translation, rigid-body rotation, shear and deformation flows. The proposed 3D-CCU schemes conserve the liquid volume and maintain the physical boundedness of liquid volume fractions to the machine precision. The 3D-CCU schemes perform favorably compared to other unsplit geometric VOF schemes when coupled to Youngs' interface reconstruction method. Moreover, the 3D-CCU schemes coupled to the Least-Square Fit algorithm are more accurate than most other VOF schemes that use a second-order accurate interface reconstruction, except those where a 3D extension of the Mosso-Swartz interface reconstruction is employed. The comparison of the different VOF schemes highlights the importance of coupling accurate interface reconstruction methods with accurate unsplit advection schemes. (C) 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc.