A parallel strategy for a level set simulation of droplets moving in a liquid medium

The simulation of two-phase flow problems involving two time-dependent spatial regions with different physical properties is computationally hard. The numerical solution of such problems is complicated by the need to represent the movement of the interface. The level set approach is a front-capturing method representing the position of the interface implicitly by the root of a suitably defined function. We describe a parallel adaptive finite element simulation based on the level set approach. For freely sedimenting n-butanol droplets in water, we quantify the parallel performance on a Xeon-based cluster using up to 256 processes.