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

Oktasendra, Fandi, Rennick, Michael, Avis, Samuel J., Panter, Jack R. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8523-7629 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:	https://www.scopus.com/pages/publication...
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	23 Feb 2026 17:30
Last Modified:	18 Jun 2026 20:53
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/102034
DOI:	10.1063/5.0267171

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