Three-dimensional numerical simulations of wave dynamics in falling films

Ever since the ground-breaking experiments by father and son Kapitza & Kapitza, falling films have not stopped fascinating the scientific community (Kapitza and Kapitza, 1949). This problem has since seen a number of experimental and theoretical studies trying to tackle the wave evolution hydrodynamics of falling films (Shkadov, 1970; Alekseenko et al., 1985; Ramaswamy et al, 1996; Karimi and Kawaji, 1998; Park and Nosoko, 2003; Zadrazil and Markides, 2014). The majority of the computational efforts in the field have primarily focused on two-dimensional domains. Attempts have also been made to carry out 3D simulations of falling films on flat plates, however, those are only limited to low Reynolds numbers (Kunugi and Kino, 2005; Yu, 2014). This work aims to study the wave dynamics of planar and circular falling films for a wide range of Reynolds numbers. The numerical investigations are carried out using 3D direct numerical simulations using different codes: a volume-of-fluid solver, and hybrid front-tracking/level-set method code (Shin et al., 2018). Comparisons with experimental data are also performed.