Hostname: page-component-76d6cb85b7-5qg8f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-07-17T22:20:11.052Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Thermodynamically consistent diffuse-interface mixture models of incompressible multicomponent fluids

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 August 2024

Marco F.P. ten Eikelder*
Affiliation:
Institute for Mechanics, Computational Mechanics Group, Technical University of Darmstadt, Franziska-Braun-Str. 7, 64287 Darmstadt, Germany
Kristoffer G. van der Zee
Affiliation:
School of Mathematical Sciences, University of Nottingham, NG7 2RD Nottingham, UK
Dominik Schillinger
Affiliation:
Institute for Mechanics, Computational Mechanics Group, Technical University of Darmstadt, Franziska-Braun-Str. 7, 64287 Darmstadt, Germany
*
Email address for correspondence: marco.eikelder@tu-darmstadt.de

Abstract

The prototypical diffuse-interface model for incompressible fluid mixtures is the Navier–Stokes Cahn–Hilliard (Allen–Cahn) model. Despite its foundation in continuum mixture theory, it is not fully compatible with this theory due to the diffusive flux approximation. This paper introduces a class of thermodynamically consistent diffuse-interface incompressible fluid mixture models that is fully compatible with the continuum theory of mixtures. The proposed models can be formulated in either constituent or mixture quantities, enabling a direct comparison with the Navier–Stokes Cahn–Hilliard (Allen–Cahn) model with non-matching densities. This comparison reveals the key modelling simplifications employed in the latter.

Information

Type
JFM Papers
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press.
Figure 0

Figure 1. A representative bubble rising problem with large deformations with respect to the original bubble shape, computed with the NSCH model; see ten Eikelder & Schillinger (2024) for details.

Figure 1

Figure 2. The potentials $W=W(\phi _{\alpha })$ and $K=K(\phi _{\alpha })$.

Figure 2

Figure 3. The free energies for the equilibrium solution $\phi _{\alpha }=\phi _{\alpha }^{eq}(\xi )$. (a) $\mathbb {W}e_{\alpha }\hat {\varPsi }_{\alpha }^{I}=\mathbb {W}e_{\alpha }\hat {\psi }_{\alpha }^{II}$ and (b) $\mathbb {W}e_{\alpha }\hat {\varPsi }_{\alpha }^{II}$.

Figure 3

Table 1. Comparison mixture model and NSCHAC model for $N$ constituents. With the term ‘mixture theory’ we indicate whether the model is compatible with mixture theory. Next, energy dissipative refers to the energy-dissipative property of the NSCHAC model. Finally, in the last line we note that both models admit the standard tangent hyperbolic interface profile for the Ginzburg–Landau free energy.