A numerical scheme based on the immersed interface method (IIM) is developed to simulate the dynamics of an axisymmetric viscous drop under an electric field. In this work, the IIM is used to solve both the fluid velocity field and the electric potential field. Detailed numerical studies on the numerical scheme show a second-order convergence. Moreover, our numerical scheme is validated by the good agreement with previous analytical models, and numerical results from the boundary integral simulations. Our method can be extended to Navier-Stokes fluid flow with nonlinear inertia effects.

We develop the immersed interface method (IIM) to simulate a two-fluid flow of two immiscible fluids with different density and viscosity. Due to the surface tension and the discontinuous fluid properties, the two-fluid flow has nonsmooth velocity and discontinuous pressure across the moving sharp interface separating the two fluids. The IIM computes the flow on a fixed Cartesian grid by incorporating into numerical schemes the necessary jump conditions induced by the interface. We present how to compute these necessary jump conditions from the analytical principal jump conditions derived in [Xu, DCDS, Supplement 2009, pp. 838-845]. We test our method on some canonical two-fluid flows. The results demonstrate that the method can handle large density and viscosity ratios, is second-order accurate in the infinity norm, and conserves mass inside a closed interface.

The immersed interface technique is incorporated into CIP method to solve one-dimensional hyperbolic equations with piecewise constant coefficients. The proposed method achieves the third order of accuracy in time and space in the vicinity of the interface where the coefficients have jump discontinuities, which is the same order of accuracy of the standard CIP scheme. Some numerical tests are given to verify the accuracy of the proposed method.

Numerical methods are developed to simulate the wave propagation in heterogeneous 2D fluid/poroelastic media. Wave propagation is described by the usual acoustics equations (in the fluid medium) and by the low-frequency Biot’s equations (in the porous medium). Interface conditions are introduced to model various hydraulic contacts between the two media: open pores, sealed pores, and imperfect pores. Well-posedness of the initial-boundary value problem is proven. Cartesian grid numerical methods previously developed in porous heterogeneous media are adapted to the present context: a fourth-order ADER scheme with Strang splitting for time- marching; a space-time mesh-refinement to capture the slow compressional wave predicted by Biot’s theory; and an immersed interface method to discretize the interface conditions and to introduce a subcell resolution. Numerical experiments and comparisons with exact solutions are proposed for the three types of interface conditions, demonstrating the accuracy of the approach.

An adaptive mesh refinement strategy is proposed in this paper for the Immersed Boundary and Immersed Interface methods for two-dimensional elliptic interface problems involving singular sources. The interface is represented by the zero level set of a Lipschitz function ϕ(x,y). Our adaptive mesh refinement is done within a small tube of |ϕ(x,y)|≤δ with finer Cartesian meshes. The discrete linear system of equations is solved by a multigrid solver. The AMR methods could obtain solutions with accuracy that is similar to those on a uniform fine grid by distributing the mesh more economically, therefore, reduce the size of the linear system of the equations. Numerical examples presented show the efficiency of the grid refinement strategy.

In this paper, an immersed interface method is presented to simulate the dynamics of inextensible interfaces in an incompressible flow. The tension is introduced as an augmented variable to satisfy the constraint of interface inextensibility and the resulting augmented system is solved by the GMRES method. In this work, the arclength of the interface is locally and globally conserved as the enclosed region undergoes deformation. The forces at the interface are calculated from the configuration of the interface and the computed augmented variable, and then applied to the fluid through the related jump conditions. The governing equations are discretized on a MAC grid via a second-order finite difference scheme which incorporates jump contributions and solved by the conjugate gradient Uzawa-type method. The proposed method is applied to several examples including the deformation of a liquid capsule with inextensible interfaces in a shear flow. Numerical results reveal that both the area enclosed by interface and arclength of interface are conserved well simultaneously. These provide further evidence on the capability of the present method to simulate incompressible flows involving inextensible interfaces.

In this paper, numerical sensitivity analysis with respect to the Reynolds number for the flow past obstacle problem is presented. To carry out such analysis, at each time step, we need to solve the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations on irregular domains twice, one for the primary variables; the other is for the sensitivity variables with homogeneous boundary conditions. The Navier-Stokes solver is the augmented immersed interface method for Navier-Stokes equations on irregular domains. One of the most important contribution of this paper is that our analysis can predict the critical Reynolds number at which the vortex shading begins to develop in the wake of the obstacle. Some interesting experiments are shown to illustrate how the critical Reynolds number varies with different geometric settings.

In this paper, a novel implementation of immersed interface method combined with Stokes solver on a MAC staggered grid for solving the steady two-fluid Stokes equations with interfaces. The velocity components along the interface are introduced as two augmented variables and the resulting augmented equation is then solved by the GMRES method. The augmented variables and /or the forces are related to the jumps in pressure and the jumps in the derivatives of both pressure and velocity, and are interpolated using cubic splines and are then applied to the fluid through the jump conditions. The Stokes equations are discretized on a staggered Cartesian grid via a second order finite difference method and solved by the conjugate gradient Uzawa-type method. The numerical results show that the overall scheme is second order accurate. The major advantages of the present IIM-Stokes solver are the efficiency and flexibility in terms of types of fluid flow and different boundary conditions. The proposed method avoids solution of the pressure Poisson equation, and comparisons are made to show the advantages of time savings by the present method. The generalized two-phase Stokes solver with correction terms has also been applied to incompressible two-phase Navier-Stokes flow.

The immersed interface method is modified to compute Schrödinger equation with discontinuous potential. By building the jump conditions of the solution into the finite difference approximation near the interface, this method can give at least second order convergence rate for the numerical solution on uniform cartesian grids. The accuracy of this algorithm is tested via several numerical examples.

In this paper, we numerically investigate the effects of surfactant on drop-drop interactions in a 2D shear flow using a coupled level-set and immersed interface approach proposed in (Xu et al., J. Comput. Phys., 212 (2006), 590-616). We find that surfactant plays a critical and nontrivial role in drop-drop interactions. In particular, we find that the minimum distance between the drops is a non-monotone function of the surfactant coverage and Capillary number. This non-monotonic behavior, which does not occur for clean drops, is found to be due to the presence of Marangoni forces along the drop interfaces. This suggests that there are non-monotonic conditions for coalescence of surfactant-laden drops, as observed in recent experiments of Leal and co-workers. Although our study is two-dimensional, we believe that drop-drop interactions in three-dimensional flows should be qualitatively similar as the Maragoni forces in the near contact region in 3D should have a similar effect.

In this paper, new finite difference methods based on the augmented immersed interface method (IIM) are proposed for simulating an inextensible moving interface in an incompressible two-dimensional flow. The mathematical models arise from studying the deformation of red blood cells in mathematical biology. The governing equations are incompressible Stokes or Navier-Stokes equations with an unknown surface tension, which should be determined in such a way that the surface divergence of the velocity is zero along the interface. Thus, the area enclosed by the interface and the total length of the interface should be conserved during the evolution process. Because of the nonlinear and coupling nature of the problem, direct discretization by applying the immersed boundary or immersed interface method yields complex nonlinear systems to be solved. In our new methods, we treat the unknown surface tension as an augmented variable so that the augmented IIM can be applied. Since finding the unknown surface tension is essentially an inverse problem that is sensitive to perturbations, our regularization strategy is to introduce a controlled tangential force along the interface, which leads to a least squares problem. For Stokes equations, the forward solver at one time level involves solving three Poisson equations with an interface. For Navier-Stokes equations, we propose a modified projection method that can enforce the pressure jump condition corresponding directly to the unknown surface tension. Several numerical experiments show good agreement with other results in the literature and reveal some interesting phenomena.