Adaptive mesh refinement techniques for the immersed interface method applied to flow problems

In this paper, we develop an adaptive mesh refinement strategy of the Immersed Interface Method for flow problems with a moving interface. The work is built on the AMR method developed for two-dimensional elliptic interface problems in the paper (CiCP, 12(2012), 515–527). The interface is captured by the zero level set of a Lipschitz continuous function φ(x, y, t). Our adaptive mesh refinement is built within a small band of ∣φ(x, y, t)∣ ⩽ δ with finer Cartesian meshes. The AMR-IIM is validated for Stokes and Navier–Stokes equations with exact solutions, moving interfaces driven by the surface tension, and classical bubble deformation problems. A new simple area preserving strategy is also proposed in this paper for the level set method.