Three-dimensional numerical simulations of falling films using an adaptive unstructured mesh

Falling liquid films have rich wave dynamics, often occurring in many industrial applications, such as condensers, evaporators and chemical reactors. A number of numerical studies featuring falling liquid films are available in the literature; the majority of them, however, have focused on two-dimensional falling films. Far fewer studies have considered three-dimensional falling films, and those that have only studied the flow in a periodic domain. The objective of this study is to investigate flow dynamics of developing three-dimensional falling films using the Navier-Stokes equations coupled with interface capturing approach over extended domains. An adaptive, unstructured mesh modelling framework is employed here to study this problem, which can modify and adapt three-dimensional meshes to better represent the underlying physics of multiphase problems and reduce computational effort without sacrificing accuracy. Numerical examples of three-dimensional falling films in a long domain are presented and discussed.