A semi-implicit method for two-phase fluid dynamics

Abstract A new technique is developed for solving the equations of two-phase fluid dynamics. This technique involves a semi-implicit differencing of the field equations and a variation of the Newton Gauss Seidel iterative method for solving at each time level the resulting system of algebraic equations. Although the technique can be applied to any of several sets of equations representing two-phase flow, including the two-fluid equations, numerical results are presented here for the drift-flux approximation in one dimension. Significant advantages of the method are its stability, ease of programming for complicated flow networks, and ease of extension to problems in two or three dimensions.