A level set approach to 3D mold filling of Newtonian fluids.

Filling operations, in which a viscous fluid displaces a gas in a complex geometry, occur with surprising frequency in many manufacturing processes. Difficulties in generating accurate models of these processes involve accurately capturing the interfacial boundary as it undergoes large motions and deformations, preventing dispersion and mass-loss during the computation, and robustly accounting for the effects of surface tension and wetting phenomena. This paper presents a numerical capturing algorithm using level set theory and finite element approximation. Important aspects of this work are addressing issues of mass-conservation and the presence of wetting effects. We have applied our methodology to a three-dimension model of a complicated filling problem. The simulated results are compared to experimental flow visualization data taken for filling of UCON oil in the identical geometry. Comparison of simulation and experiment indicates that the simulation conserved mass adequately and the simulated interface shape was in approximate agreement with experiment. Differences seen were largely attributed to inaccuracies in the wetting line model.Copyright © 2003 by ASME