lcs4Foam – An OpenFOAM Function Object to Compute Lagrangian Coherent Structures

Abstract

To facilitate the understanding and to quantitatively assess the material transport in fluids, a modern characterisation method has emerged in fluid dynamics in the last decades that is based on dynamical systems theory. It allows to examine the most influential material lines which are called Lagrangian Coherent Structures (LCS) and order the material transport into dynamically distinct regions at large scales which resist diffusion or mixing. LCS reveal the robust skeleton of material surfaces and are essential to assess material transport in time-dependent flows quantitatively. Candidates of LCS can be estimated and visualised from finite-time stretching and folding fields by calculating the Finite-Time Lyapunov Exponents (FTLE).

In this contribution, we provide a function object to compute FTLE during CFD simulation by coupling OpenFOAM to the third-party library libcfd2lcs. This enables the OpenFOAM community to assess the geometry of the material transport in any flow quantitatively on-the-fly using virtually any OpenFOAM flow solver.