NUMERICAL SIMULATION OF RAYLEIGH–TAYLOR INSTABILITY BASED ON AN IMPROVED PARTICLE LEVEL SET METHOD

An improved particle correction procedure for particle level set method is proposed and applied to the simulation of Rayleigh–Taylor instability (RTI) of the incompressible two-phase immiscible fluids. In the proposed method, an improved particle correction method is developed to deal with all the relative positions between escaped particles and cell corners, which can reduce the disturbance arising in the distance function correction process due to the non-normal direction movement of escaped particles. The improved method is validated through accurately capturing the moving interface of the Zalesak's disk. Furthermore, coupled with the projection method for solving the Navier–Stokes equations, the time-dependent evolution of the RTI interface over a wide range of Reynolds numbers, Atwood numbers and Weber numbers are numerically investigated. A good agreement between the present results and the existing analytical solutions is obtained and the accuracy of the proposed method is further verified. Moreover, the effects of control parameters including viscosity, density ratio, and surface tension coefficient on the evolution of RTI are analyzed in detail, and a critical Weber number for the development of RTI is found.