High-fidelity interface tracking in compressible flows: Unlimited anchored adaptive level set

The interface-capturing-fidelity issue of the level set method is addressed wholly within the Eulerian framework. Our aim is for a practical and efficient way to realize the expected benefits of grid resolution and high order schemes. Based on a combination of structured adaptive mesh refinement (SAMR), rather than quad/octrees, and on high-order spatial discretization, rather than the use of Lagrangian particles, our method is tailored to compressible flows, while it provides a potentially useful alternative to the particle level set (PLS) for incompressible flows. Interesting salient features of our method include (a) avoidance of limiting (in treating the Hamiltonian of the level set equation), (b) anchoring the level set in a manner that ensures no drift and no spurious oscillations of the zero level during PDE-reinitialization, and (c) a non-linear tagging procedure for defining the neighborhood of the interface subject to mesh refinement. Numerous computational results on a set of benchmark problems (strongly deforming, stretching and tearing interfaces) demonstrate that with this approach, implemented up to 11th order accuracy, the level set method becomes essentially free of mass conservation errors and also free of parasitic interfacial oscillations, while it is still highly efficient, and convenient for 3D parallel implementation. In addition, demonstration of performance in fully-coupled simulations is presented for multimode Rayleigh–Taylor instability (low-Mach number regime) and shock-induced, bubble-collapse (highly compressible regime).