On a numerical strategy to compute gravity currents of non-Newtonian fluids

This paper is devoted to the presentation of a numerical scheme for the simulation of gravity currents of non-Newtonian fluids. The two dimensional computational grid is fixed and the free-surface is described as a polygonal interface independent from the grid and advanced in time by a Lagrangian technique. Navier–Stokes equations are semi-discretized in time by the Characteristic-Galerkin method, which finally leads to solve a generalized Stokes problem posed on a physical domain limited by the free surface to only a part of the computational grid. To this purpose, we implement a Galerkin technique with a particular approximation space, defined as the restriction to the fluid domain of functions of a finite element space. The decomposition–coordination method allows to deal without any regularization with a variety of non-linear and possibly non-differentiable constitutive laws. Beside more analytical tests, we revisit with this numerical method some simulations of gravity currents of the literature, up to now investigated within the simplified thin-flow approximation framework.