Wall-bounded multiphase flows of N immiscible incompressible fluids: Consistency and contact-angle boundary condition

We present an effective method for simulating wall-bounded multiphase flows consisting of N (N⩾2) immiscible incompressible fluids with different densities, viscosities and pairwise surface tensions. The N-phase physical formulation is based on a modified thermodynamically consistent phase field model that is more general than in a previous work, and it is developed by considering the reduction consistency if some of the fluid components were absent from the system. We propose an N-phase contact-angle boundary condition that is reduction consistent between N phases and M phases (2⩽M⩽N−1). We also present a numerical algorithm for solving the N-phase governing equations together with the contact-angle boundary conditions developed herein. Extensive numerical experiments are presented for several flow problems involving multiple fluid components and solid-wall boundaries to investigate the wettability effects with multiple types of contact angles. In particular, we compare simulation results with the de Gennes theory for the contact-angle effects on the liquid drop spreading on wall surfaces, and demonstrate that our method produces physically accurate results.