An analysis of parasitic current generation in Volume of Fluid simulations

Parasitic currents are unphysical fluid motions generated when using implementations of the Continuum Surface Force technique to model surface tension forces in Eulerian-based multi-phase Computational Fluid Dynamics calculations. In this paper, we derive and validate a correlation for the magnitude of these currents as a function of the physical and numerical parameters used in a given simulation. We find that these currents may be limited by both the inertial and viscous terms in the Navier–Stokes equations, and that they do not decrease in magnitude with increased mesh refinement or decreased computational time step. The current magnitudes that would be generated when simulating a number of common physical systems are examined, and it is found that in some circumstances their magnitude is significant.