A material interface tracking approach for multi-fluid hydrodynamics

J.A. Greenough, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

The Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) has brought new resources into the areas of development of advance numerical methods and large-scale scientific computing. This ambitious program is aimed at producing state-of-the-art numerical tools that can be used as effective alternatives to an experimental testing program.

We are pursuing a related research project, collaboratively with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, aimed at evaluating an adaptive Eulerian method for multi-fluid flows in regimes appropriate to Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) and National Ignition Facility (NIF) conditions. Generically, the flow configurations contain sharp interfaces separating distinct materials, are subjected to complex forces, and occur in non-Cartesian orthogonal coordinate systems.

Since we are predominately dealing with discontinuous material interfaces, we have developed a volume-of-fluid (VOF) interface reconstruction method, that is at-worst second-order accurate and generalizes to non-Cartesian geometries. The interface reconstruction is coupled to a multi-fluid method that allows for a completely general equation-of-state (EOS) description for each material. The entire algorithm is embedded in an adaptive-mesh-refinement framework so that computational effort is focused in regions of interest (e.g., material interfaces).

Results will be presented for a variety of flows including solid-body rotation of a fluid cylinder, shock-refractions, interacting shock waves, and ablatively-driven imploding shells using the new method as well as a more standard method.

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Last Modified: October 14, 1997