Kinetic-based Multiphase Flow Simulation

Wei Li*¹, Daoming Liu*¹, Mathieu Desbrun², Jin Huang³, Xiaopei Liu¹

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, accepted, 2020

1. ShanghaiTech University
2. California Institute of Technology
3. Zhejiang University
 

Abstract

Multiphase flows exhibit a large realm of complex behaviors such as bubbling, glugging, wetting, and splashing which emerge from air-water and water-solid interactions. Current fluid solvers in graphics have demonstrated remarkable success in reproducing each of these visual effects, but none have offered a model general enough to capture all of them concurrently. In contrast, computational fluid dynamics have developed very general approaches to multiphase flows, typically based on kinetic models. Yet, in both communities, there is dearth of methods that can simulate density ratios and Reynolds numbers required for the type of challenging real-life simulations that movie productions strive to digitally create, such as air-water flows. In this paper, we propose a kinetic model of the coupling of the Navier-Stokes equations with a conservative phase-field equation, and provide a series of numerical improvement over existing kinetic-based solvers to offer a general multiphase flow solver. The resulting algorithm is embarrassingly parallel, conservative, far more stable than current solvers even for real-life conditions, and general enough to capture all the typical multiphase flow behaviors. Various simulation results are presented, including comparisons to both previous work and real footage, to highlight the advantages of our new method.

     
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