Removing the stiffness from interfacial flows with surface tension (Q1339557)

A new formulation is presented for computing the motion of fluid interfaces with surface tension in two-dimensional, irrotational, and incompressible fluids. Using this formulation, we give implicit time integration methods that have no high order time step stability constraint associated with surface tension and are explicit in Fourier space. The approach is based on a boundary integral formulation and applies to computing with high resolution the motion of interfaces in Hele-Shaw flows and the motion of free surfaces in inviscid flows governed by the Euler equations.