AIR-HPCResearch Group · UPCT
AIR-HPC / AIR Toolkits / gVOF

Mesh-level geometric volume-of-fluid methods

gVOF

Mesh-level unsplit geometric volume-of-fluid methods for volume-fraction initialization, interface reconstruction and advection on arbitrary structured and unstructured grids.

Latest release v1.1Fortran · OpenMPGPL-3.0-or-later

Overview

gVOF is a Fortran package for interface initialization, piecewise linear interface calculation (PLIC) reconstruction and unsplit geometric advection on arbitrary two- and three-dimensional grids. It integrates the cell-level geometry provided by AIR Toolkits into mesh-level methods for structured and unstructured meshes.

Computational work within gVOF is parallelized using OpenMP for shared-memory execution. The package does not implement MPI and remains independent of any particular flow solver. Distributed-memory parallelism can instead be supplied by a host framework through an integration layer such as AIRgVOF, which combines OpenFOAM's native MPI decomposition with gVOF's OpenMP parallelism.

Main capabilities

  • Volume-fraction initialization on arbitrary meshes.
  • PLIC interface reconstruction using several normal-estimation and positioning strategies.
  • Unsplit geometric advection based on fluid-volume and wetted-area time integration.
  • Support for two- and three-dimensional structured and unstructured grids.
  • OpenMP parallel execution of mesh-level algorithms on shared-memory systems.
  • Mass-conservative interface transport using robust cell-level geometrical kernels.

The public release includes gVOF’s native volume-fraction initialization method; the development version adds a higher-order option based on hiVOF. Grid preprocessing and selective tagging are treated as supporting operations rather than headline capabilities.

Software characteristics

Language
Fortran
Parallelization
OpenMP (shared memory); no native MPI layer
Compilers tested
GNU and Intel Fortran
Platforms tested
Linux and macOS
Dependencies
VOFTools and isoap kernels included
Build
Makefile-based

Hybrid MPI + OpenMP execution is provided at the AIRgVOF integration level, not by gVOF itself.

Documentation, releases and downloads

gVOF v1.1 was published on 26 June 2026. The Zenodo package includes source code, user documentation, examples and tests. Version 1.0 was also deposited in Mendeley Data. gVOF 2 is in preparation.

Download gVOF v1.1

Concept DOI10.5281/zenodo.20545173Mendeley Data10.17632/9gmn6gsb6p.1

Citation, publications and license

When using gVOF v1.1, please cite the specific software release:

López, J. (2026). gVOF 1.1: An open-source package for unsplit geometric volume of fluid methods on arbitrary grids (Version 1.1) [Computer software]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20923425

Related publications

The 2022 article provides the principal scientific description of gVOF's architecture and implemented methods. The 2024 article describes important isosurface-based interface-reconstruction methods incorporated into the package.

López, J., & Hernández, J. (2022). gVOF: An open-source package for unsplit geometric volume of fluid methods on arbitrary grids. Computer Physics Communications, 277, 108400. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpc.2022.108400
López, J. (2024). Isosurface extraction for piecewise-linear reconstruction of complex interfaces on arbitrary grids. Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, 425, 116951. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cma.2024.116951

License

gVOF is distributed under the GNU General Public License v3 or later (GPL-3.0-or-later).