An Immersed Finite Element Method and its Application to Multiphase Problems

Abstract: Multiphase flows are frequently encountered in many important physical and industrial applications. These flows are usually characterized by very complicated structure that involves free moving surfaces inside the fluid domain and discontinuous or even singular material properties of the flow. The application range for the multiphase flow phenomena is extremely wide, ranging from processing industry to environmental problems, from biological applications to food industry and so on. Unfortunately, due to the inherent complexity of these problems, their solution proved to be a considerable challenge. Thus, in the many applications, the predictive capability and physical understanding must rely heavily on numerical models.In this thesis we develop and analyze a finite element based method for the solution of multiphase problems. This thesis consists of four papers. In paper 1 we develop our finite element based method for the elliptic interface problems. The interface jump conditions that are present due to the discontinuity of the coefficients and presence of the singular forces are derived. Using these jump conditions, we enrich the finite element spaces in order to account for the irregularities in the flow. The resulting method was applied to the interface Stokes problem, modeling a thin elastic rubber band immersed in the homogeneous fluid. In order to apply the introduced method, the interface Stokes problem was rewritten as a sequence of three Poisson problems, one for the pressure and two for the velocity components. Paper 2 is an extension of the ideas used in paper 1. Namely, third order Hermitian polynomials are used as basis functions, their modification according to the interface jump conditions is presented and analyzed, both theoretically and numerically. The rigorous error analysis of the introduced method for two-dimensional elliptic problems is presented in paper 3. The results imply that our method is second order accurate in the L2 norm. Finally, paper 4 concerns with the extension of our method to a coupled interface Stokes problem, that contains both singular forces and discontinuities in the material properties. An application to the Rayleigh-Taylor instability problem is presented.