Studying the contact point and interface moving in a sinusoidal tube with lattice Boltzmann method

Fang, H. P., Fan, L. .W., Wang, Z., Lin, Z. F. and Qian, Y. H. (2001) Studying the contact point and interface moving in a sinusoidal tube with lattice Boltzmann method. International Journal of Modern Physics B, 15 (9). pp. 1287-1303. ISSN 1793-6578 doi: 10.1142/S0217979201004848

Abstract/Summary

The multicomponent nonideal gas lattice Boltzmann model by Shan and Chen (S-C) is used to study the immiscible displacement in a sinusoidal tube. The movement of interface and the contact point (contact line in three-dimension) is studied. Due to the roughness of the boundary, the contact point shows "stick-slip" mechanics. The "stick-slip" effect decreases as the speed of the interface increases. For fluids that are nonwetting, the interface is almost perpendicular to the boundaries at most time, although its shapes at different position of the tube are rather different. When the tube becomes narrow, the interface turns a complex curves rather than remains simple menisci. The velocity is found to vary considerably between the neighbor nodes close to the contact point, consistent with the experimental observation that the velocity is multi-values on the contact line. Finally, the effect of three boundary conditions is discussed. The average speed is found different for different boundary conditions. The simple bounce-back rule makes the contact point move fastest. Both the simple bounce-back and the no-slip bounce-back rules are more sensitive to the roughness of the boundary in comparison with the half-way bounce-back rule. The simulation results suggest that the S-C model may be a promising tool in simulating the displacement behaviour of two immiscible fluids in complex geometry.