GeoChemFoam: Operator Splitting based time-stepping for efficient Volume-Of-Fluid simulation of capillary-dominated two-phase flow

Abstract: We present a novel time-stepping method, called Operator Splitting with Capillary Relaxation (OSCAR), for efficient Volume-Of-Fluid simulations of capillary-dominated two-phase flow. OSCAR uses operator splitting methods to separate the viscous drag and the surface tension forces. Different time-steps are used for the viscous drag steps, controlled by the injection velocity, and for the capillary relaxation steps, controlled by the velocity of capillary waves. Although OSCAR induces an additional numerical error of order 0 in time resulting from the splitting, it is well suited for simulations at low capillary number. First, the splitting error decreases with the capillary number and at low capillary number, the relaxation steps converge before reaching their last iteration, resulting in a large speed-up (here up to 250x) compared to standard time-stepping methods. The method is implemented in GeoChemFoam, our OpenFOAM-based CFD solver. Convergence, accuracy and efficiency are demonstrated on three benchmark cases: (1) the steady motion of an air bubble in a straight 2D microchannel, (2) injection of supercritical CO2 in a 3D constricted channel leading to a snap-off, and (3) water drainage in a 2D oil-wet micromodel representing a porous media.