Free surface stabilization

Small disequilibria in the location of a free surface can cause instabilities in the surface position and result in a “sloshing” instability. This may be countered with a quasi-implicit free surface integration scheme described in Kaus et al. [2010]. This scheme enters the governing equations as a small stabilizing surface traction that prevents the free surface advection from overshooting its true position at the next time step. ASPECT implements this stabilization, the details of which may be found in Kaus et al. [2010].

An example of a simple model which uses a free surface may be found in Using a free surface.