A Direct Ghost Fluid Method for Modeling Explosive Gas and Water Flows

This work presents a Direct Ghost Fluid Method (DGFM) as part of a two-fluid numerical framework suitable to model explosive gas and water flows resulting from underwater explosion (UNDEX). Due to the presence of explosive gas and water with shock waves in the modeling domain, classic Eulerian methods with inherent diffusion may not be effective. Numerical diffusion occurs due to nonphysical diffused density at material interfaces, which creates spurious pressure oscillations and significantly degrades the quality of the numerical results. To eliminate or minimize numerical diffusion, sharp interface methods having no mixed elements may be used in multifluid flow computations. The Direct Ghost Fluid Method (DGFM) described in this paper uses direct extrapolation of density (vice pressure) and tangential velocity from real to ghost fluid. The spurious pressure oscillations near the material interface are therefore minimized. One-, two-, and three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solvers that have DGFM as an essential part in their framework to model UNDEX interface conditions are developed, explored, and applied to the simulation of a series of benchmark problems. Excellent agreement is obtained among the simulations, the analytical solutions, and the experiments.