A new volume conservation enforcement method for PLIC reconstruction in general convex grids

A comprehensive study is made of methods for resolving the volume conservation enforcement problem in the PLIC reconstruction of an interface in general 3D convex grids. Different procedures to bracket the solution when solving the problem using previous standard methods are analyzed in detail. A new interpolation bracketing procedure and an improved analytical method to find the interface plane constant are proposed. These techniques are combined in a new method to enforce volume conservation, which does not require the sequential polyhedra truncation operations typically used in standard methods. The new methods have been implemented into existing geometrical routines described in López and Hernández [15], which are further improved by using more efficient formulae to compute areas and volumes of general convex 2 and 3D polytopes. Different tests using regular and irregular cell geometries are carried out to demonstrate the robustness and substantial improvement in computational efficiency of the proposed techniques, which increase the computation speed of the mentioned routines by up to 3 times for the 3D problems considered in this work.