Surface tension dominated flows using smoothed particle hydrodynamics

Abstract

The tiny scale and time duration coupled with unfriendly environment for instrumentation represented by droplet and thin film make experimental monitoring challenging, and consequently the need for computational model for capturing the droplet and thin films processes. Traditional computational models such as the Finite Element Method (FEM) is not able to capture large deformations effectively, as well as accurate interface tracking and material histories remains challenging. The Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) which is a simple, effective and relatively new numerical model, can reliably capture and model the complex dynamic behaviour of surface tension dominated free-surface flows. The major advantage of SPH over the Eulerian approach is that the fluid, represented by particles, is naturally suitable for complex geometries and problems arising from free-surface flows. The present work advance the work of applying SPH to droplets with different surface tension models and with one of these models been applied for the first time in SPH. The solver was developed from scratch with C++ programming language for single phase problems to increase the computational performance. The developed SPH solver is described and verified against existing theoretical and experimental results. A detailed investigation of droplet simulation and contact angle hysteresis is analysed and described in order to demonstrate the strength of the developed SPH solver. Part of the results was submitted to International Journal for Numerical Methods in Fluids and received positive feedback.