Basilisk — The Complete Guide: Two-Phase Flow, Droplets and Waves on Adaptive Meshes

Basilisk is free software (GPL) for solving partial differential equations on adaptive Cartesian meshes, which refine automatically only where something interesting happens. It was developed by Stéphane Popinet of CNRS as the successor to Gerris, and is especially popular in research on free-surface flows.

Basilisk

Stéphane Popinet (CNRS)

Flow solver on adaptive Cartesian meshes — the successor of Gerris, especially strong for free-surface flows and droplets.

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What you get

Adaptive mesh — automatic refinement and coarsening throughout the run.
Two-phase flow — tracking the liquid-gas interface, surface tension included.
Droplets, bubbles and waves — pinch-off, splashing and breaking free surfaces.
Shallow water and oceanography — models for large-scale environmental flows.
Example library — documented cases on the website that you can run and modify.

Who it suits and what to know

Researchers and flow engineers who need high accuracy on problems with a free interface. There is no graphical interface: you write the simulation as a C program with Basilisk’s extensions, compile and run it, and installation is from source on Linux or macOS. Anyone who does not program in C faces a steep learning curve. For engineering problems with complex CAD geometry, OpenFOAM is more practical.

Related tools

For a general engineering solver on unstructured meshes — OpenFOAM. For waves and shallow water with finite volumes — Clawpack. For free-surface flows with a particle method — DualSPHysics.