Conservative Volume-of-Fluid method for free-surface simulations on Cartesian-grids

This paper contributes to the state of the art in Cartesian-grid methods through development of new advection and reconstruction Volume-of-Fluid (VOF) algorithms which are applicable to two and three-dimensional flows. A computationally efficient and second-order VOF reconstruction method is presented which uses no inversions to determine the interface normal direction. Next, the lack of conservation of fluid volume in previous VCF advection methods are shown to be due to improper treatment of one-dimensional stretching in the velocity field. This paper uses simple explicit time stepping and a cell-center estimate of the volume fraction in the dilatation term to achieve a completely conservative advection method. The new methods are simple, robust and shown to out perform existing approaches for canonical test problems relevant to breaking wave flows. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.