Verification of surface tension in the parallel free surface lattice Boltzmann method in waLBerla

Abstract The free surface lattice Boltzmann method in the parallel software framework waLBerla solves a wide range of two-phase flow scenarios efficiently by neglecting the gas flow and only taking the gas pressure into account. To obtain a good parallel efficiency, an extensive algorithm computes the curvature needed to calculate the surface tension pressure by using only a restricted set of neighboring data, reducing the communication effort. This, however, is assumed to be the main limitation of the accuracy of the surface tension computation. Nevertheless, this work shows that this method is able to simulate typical two-phase applications accurately enough. It is validated by comparing the evolution of capillary waves to analytical solution, and checking the agreement of a rising bubble’s velocity with experiments. The results show that the method differs less than 10% from theory in the micro-scale, and lies well within the confidence interval of experimental measurements.