TY - GEN A1 - Mellado, Juan Pedro A1 - Stevens, Bjorn A1 - Schmidt, Heiko A1 - Peters, Norbert T1 - Two-fluid formulation of the cloud-top mixing layer for direct numerical simulation T2 - Theoretical and computational fluid dynamics N2 - A mixture fraction formulation to perform direct numerical simulations of a disperse and dilute two-phase system consisting of water liquid and vapor in air in local thermodynamic equilibrium using a twofluid model is derived and discussed. The goal is to understand the assumptions intrinsic to this simplified but commonly employed approach for the study of two-layer buoyancy reversing systems like the cloud-top mixing layer. Emphasis is placed on molecular transport phenomena. In particular, a formulation is proposed that recovers the actual nondiffusive liquid-phase continuum as a limiting case of differential diffusion. High-order numerical schemes suitable for direct numerical simulations in the compressible and Boussinesq limits are described, and simulations are presented to validate the incompressible approach. As expected, the Boussinesq approximation provides an accurate and efficient description of the flow on the scales (of the order of meters) that are considered. KW - Free convection KW - Free turbulent flows KW - Multiphase KW - Stratocumulus clouds Y1 - 2010 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s00162-010-0182-x SN - 1432-2250 SN - 0935-4964 VL - 24 IS - 6 SP - 511 EP - 536 ER -