Dual Area-Volume-of-Fluid (DAVOF): co-advecting volume and face-area fractions for a closed-form, cell-local interface normal and position on unstructured meshes

Abstract

Geometric Volume-of-Fluid (VOF) on unstructured polyhedral meshes reconstructs the interface orientation from the volume fractions of a stencil of neighbours; on irregular cells and in the presence of wisps it degrades, and the curvature built on it drives the parasitic currents of capillary flows. We transport, consistently to the volume fraction of every cell, the wetted fraction of every face area. From the area and volume fractions, closed-form equations recover the interface normal and position of a cell, for the first time in VOF: the normal from one sum over the cell's own faces, the divergence theorem on the liquid sub-volume, and the plane's position from a second, without neighbours or iteration. Both identities are exact for a plane on hexahedral, perturbed and polyhedral cells. On a sphere and an ellipsoid the normal has the order of the face fractions, the position is second order for every state and mesh, and a quadric through one ring of recovered normals gives a converging curvature where the reference models show none. Transported with the plane clipping, the ring normal, the same identity on the union of the cell's ring, stabilises the state and carries a sphere over 3.3 diameters bounded and conservative, first order in the face fractions as the clipping law predicts, at plicRDF's position and shape errors. A preliminary transport implementation with one paraboloid per cell, its frame from the normal, its curvature tensor from the ring and its position from the volume fraction, carries the sphere bounded and conservative over the resolution ladder with face fractions of order 2.8 per period with the exact normal and 2.1 with the ring quadric's normal over N = 32 to 128. The loop has the order of the normal it is fed; a transported normal of second order is the research goal. This document is the basis on which the further development of the method is documented.