Fluid-Solid Coupling in Kinetic Two-Phase Flow Simulation

Overview & Synopsis

Real-life flows exhibit complex and visually appealing behaviors such as bubbling, splashing, glugging and wetting that simulation techniques in graphics have attempted to capture for years. While early approaches were not capable of reproducing multiphase flow phenomena due to their excessive numerical viscosity and low accuracy, kinetic solvers based on the lattice Boltzmann method have recently demonstrated the ability to simulate water-air interaction at high Reynolds numbers in a massively-parallel fashion. However, robust and accurate handling of fluid-solid coupling has remained elusive: be it for CG or CFD solvers, as soon as the motion of immersed objects is too fast or too sudden, pressures near boundaries and interfacial forces exhibit spurious oscillations leading to blowups. Built upon a phase-field and velocity-distribution based lattice-Boltzmann solver for multiphase flows, this paper spells out a series of numerical improvements in momentum exchange, interfacial forces, and two-way coupling to drastically reduce these typical artifacts, thus significantly expanding the types of fluid-solid coupling that we can efficiently simulate. We highlight the numerical benefits of our solver through various challenging simulation results, including comparisons to previous work and real footage.