The diffuse solid method for wetting and multiphase fluid simulations in complex geometries

Oktasendra, Fandi, Rennick, Michael, Avis, Samuel J., Panter, Jack R. and Kusumaatmaja, Halim (2025) The diffuse solid method for wetting and multiphase fluid simulations in complex geometries. Physics of Fluids, 37 (5). ISSN 1070-6631

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Abstract

We develop a diffuse solid method that is versatile and accurate for modeling wetting and multiphase flows in highly complex geometries. In this scheme, we harness N + 1 -component phase field models to investigate interface shapes and flow dynamics of N fluid components, and we optimize how to constrain the evolution of the component employed as the solid phase to conform to any pre-defined geometry. Implementations for phase field energy minimization and lattice Boltzmann method are presented. Our approach does not need special treatment for the fluid-solid wetting boundary condition, which makes it simple to implement. To demonstrate its broad applicability, we employ the diffuse solid method to explore wide-ranging examples, including droplet contact angle on a flat surface, particle adsorption on a fluid-fluid interface, critical pressure on micropillars and on Salvinia leaf structures, capillary rise against gravity, Lucas-Washburn's law for capillary filling, and droplet motion on a sinusoidally undulated surface. Our proposed approach can be beneficial to computationally study multiphase fluid interactions with textured solid surfaces that are ubiquitous in nature and engineering applications.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Data Availability: The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request.
Uncontrolled Keywords:	energy minimization,cassie-baxter state,computational fluid dynamics,lattice boltzmann methods,multiphase flows,capillarity,computational mechanics,condensed matter physics,mechanics of materials,mechanical engineering,fluid flow and transfer processes ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/2200/2206
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Science > School of Engineering, Mathematics and Physics
Related URLs:	http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?...
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	23 Feb 2026 17:30
Last Modified:	23 Feb 2026 17:30
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/102034
DOI:	10.1063/5.0267171

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