Process / pipelineFluid Dynamics
Volume of Fluid Method
The Volume of Fluid (VOF) method is an Eulerian interface-tracking technique for multiphase flow simulations, developed by Hirt and Nichols in 1981. Instead of explicitly tracking the interface between phases, VOF advects a scalar field (the volume fraction) that represents the fractional volume of one phase in each grid cell. This approach elegantly handles topological changes (splashing, merging, breaking) without explicit interface reconstruction, making it ideal for complex multiphase flows on fixed Eulerian grids.
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Sources
- Hirt, C. W., & Nichols, B. D. (1981). Volume of fluid (VOF) method for the dynamics of free boundaries. Journal of Computational Physics, 39(1), 201-225. DOI: 10.1016/0021-9991(81)90145-5 ↗
- Youngs, D. L. (1982). Time-dependent multi-material flow with large fluid distortion. In Numerical Methods for Fluid Dynamics (pp. 273-285). Academic Press. link ↗
- Ubbink, O., & Issa, R. I. (1999). A method for capturing sharp fluid interfaces on arbitrary meshes. Journal of Computational Physics, 153(1), 26-50. DOI: 10.1006/jcph.1999.6276 ↗