Spatial and temporal stability issues for interfacial flows with surface tension (Q1344128): Difference between revisions

Even for stably stratified flows like water waves, it turns out that straightforward spatial discretizations (of the boundary integral formulation) generate numerical instability. Second, surface tension introduces a large number of derivatives through the Laplace-Young boundary condition. This induces severe time step restrictions for explicit time integration methods. In this paper, we present a class of stable spatial discretizations, and we present a reformulation of the equations of motion that make apparent how to remove the high-order time step restrictions introduced by the surface tension.