An open-source solver for two-phase viscoelastic fluid flow with sharp interface advection in OpenFOAM

The study of viscoelastic fluids has been a topic of increased study in recent years due to their wide use in the food and pharmaceutical industries as well as their existence in many biological systems. Simulation thereof has been a major topic to increase our understanding of such systems. Various rheological models from the simple Maxwell or Oldroyd-B to the more complex Phan–Thien–Tanner have been proposed for solving such flow problems. Similarly, various simulation methods from volume-of-fluid to finite differences and even Lagrangian formulations have been developed to utilise these models and accurately represent these complex fluids in single-phase and multiphase computational fluid dynamic cases. In this work, we propose a novel fully open-source two-phase viscoelastic solver using the volume-of-fluid method through the OpenFoam software package and utilise some of the most recent advancements in the field of interface reconstruction and advection. We validate this solver in two distinct cases: a 3D pipe flow experiment for the single-phase bulk flow field and a well-established Weissenberg flow effect (rod climbing experiment) for the representation of the interface.