Three-dimensional direct numerical simulation of falling liquid films*

The dynamics of a thin film falling down an inclined solid surface have attracted the attention of many researchers because of the richness and variety of waves which develop on its liquid-air interface. Besides experimental work, the problem has been widely studied in the literature but direct numerical simulations have been limited to two-dimensions or low-dimensional modeling for three-dimensional problems. We present a computational study of falling liquid films in a three-dimensional inclined rectangular domain (45$^\circ$) using the massively parallel code BLUE for Lagrangian tracking of arbitrarily deformable phase interfaces. Calculations are carried out on O($10^3$) cores in a large domain (24cm $\times$ 12cm $\times$ 1.5 cm) for Reynolds and Kapitza numbers of 100 and 10, respectively, in order to obtain several three-dimensional wave patterns and solitary waves.