Improved conservative level set method

The standard level set (LS) method can capture the interface smoothly and gives accurate normal vectors but suffers from an excessive amount of mass gain/loss. The conservative LS method exhibits excellent mass conservation properties, but the result is usually contaminated by inaccurate interface normal vectors. To address this problem, the improved conservative LS method is proposed to capture the interface smoothly with excellent mass conservation properties. The improvement of the method lies in that the surface normal is computed from a signed distance function, which is also advected and reinitialized in the flow fields, instead of using the Heaviside function. The proposed method is implemented by implicit two‐step Taylor–Galerkin approximation within the finite element context. The approach is validated with the well‐known benchmark problems and is found out to be highly reliable and accurate. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.