Thermodynamically consistent diffuse-interface mixture models of incompressible multicomponent fluids

Abstract

The prototypical diffuse-interface model for incompressible fluid mixtures is the Navier–Stokes Cahn–Hilliard (Allen–Cahn) model. Despite its foundation in continuum mixture theory, it is not fully compatible with this theory due to the diffusive flux approximation. This paper introduces a class of thermodynamically consistent diffuse-interface incompressible fluid mixture models that is fully compatible with the continuum theory of mixtures. The proposed models can be formulated in either constituent or mixture quantities, enabling a direct comparison with the Navier–Stokes Cahn–Hilliard (Allen–Cahn) model with non-matching densities. This comparison reveals the key modelling simplifications employed in the latter.