Three-dimensional numerical simulations of falling liquid films*

Falling liquid films down an inclined or vertical surface have rich wave dynamics, often occurring in many industrial applications, such as condensers, evaporators and chemical reactors. There are some numerical studies for falling liquid films, however most of them have focused on two-dimensional falling films or three-dimensional falling films in a periodic domain. The objective of this study is to investigate flow dynamics of fully developed three-dimensional falling films using the Navier-Stokes equations coupled with interface capturing approach. An adaptive unstructured mesh modelling framework is employed here to study this problem, which can modify and adapt unstructured meshes to better represent the underlying physics of multiphase problems and reduce computational effort without sacrificing accuracy. Numerical examples of two-dimensional and three-dimensional falling films in a long domain with different flow conditions are presented and discussed.