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Improved conservative level set method
Author(s) -
Zhao Lanhao,
Bai Xin,
Li Tongchun,
Williams J. J. R.
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
international journal for numerical methods in fluids
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.938
H-Index - 112
eISSN - 1097-0363
pISSN - 0271-2091
DOI - 10.1002/fld.3907
Subject(s) - heaviside step function , level set method , conservation of mass , finite element method , context (archaeology) , mathematics , level set (data structures) , benchmark (surveying) , signed distance function , set (abstract data type) , algorithm , function (biology) , discontinuous galerkin method , mathematical optimization , computer science , mathematical analysis , mechanics , engineering , physics , artificial intelligence , structural engineering , paleontology , geodesy , segmentation , evolutionary biology , image segmentation , biology , programming language , geography
SUMMARY The standard level set (LS) method can capture the interface smoothly and gives accurate normal vectors but suffers from an excessive amount of mass gain/loss. The conservative LS method exhibits excellent mass conservation properties, but the result is usually contaminated by inaccurate interface normal vectors. To address this problem, the improved conservative LS method is proposed to capture the interface smoothly with excellent mass conservation properties. The improvement of the method lies in that the surface normal is computed from a signed distance function, which is also advected and reinitialized in the flow fields, instead of using the Heaviside function. The proposed method is implemented by implicit two‐step Taylor–Galerkin approximation within the finite element context. The approach is validated with the well‐known benchmark problems and is found out to be highly reliable and accurate. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.