A HHO formulation for variable density incompressible flows where the density is purely advected

We propose a Hybrid High-Order (HHO) formulation of the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations with variable density that provides exact conservation of volume and, accordingly, pure advection of the density variable. The spatial discretization relies on hybrid velocity-density-pressure spaces and the temporal discretization is based on Explicit Singly Diagonal Implicit Runge–Kutta (ESDIRK) methods. The formulation possesses some attractive features that can be fruitfully exploited for the simulation of mixtures of immiscible incompressible fluids, namely: conservation of volume enforced cell-by-cell up to machine precision, pressure-robustness, ability to preserve density bounds at low-order, robustness in the convection dominated regime, weak imposition of boundary conditions, implicit high-order accurate time stepping, reduced memory footprint thanks to static condensation, possibility to exploit inherited p-multilevel solution strategies to improve the performance of iterative solvers. After addressing stability at the discrete level, numerical validation is performed showcasing spatial and temporal convergence rates. To conclude, we tackle the Rayleigh–Taylor instability at different Atwood and Reynolds numbers focusing on mesh independence capabilities.