Under the action of a strong electric field, conducting
droplets suspended in a dielectric liquid deform, attract each
other, and can merge after their touching. The latter processes are
called electrodeformation and electrocoalescence. The arbitrary
Lagrangian-Eulerian method is one of the available approaches to
simulate two-phase media, which has one crucial advantage over
other techniques: it lets describing step-change in liquid
properties when crossing the interface between two fluids.
However, it generally fails to describe processes of volume
merging or separation (i.e., changing topology). Suggested here is
a computational model, where the idea of how-to-describe
topology change during electrocoalescence is implemented.
Moreover, numerical results were experimentally verified, which
enables the model using to describe electrohydrodynamic
processes in two-phase immiscible liquids and, in particular,
electrocoalescence.