A Revisit of Implicit Monolithic Algorithms for Compressible Solids Immersed Inside a Compressible Liquid
Authors: Wang Sheldon 
Published: August 2021

With the development of mature Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) tools for fluids (air and liquid) and Finite Element Methods (FEM) for solids and structures, many approaches have been proposed to tackle the so-called Fluid–Structure Interaction or Fluid–Solid Interaction (FSI) problems. Traditional partitioned iterations are often used to link available FEM codes with CFD codes in the study of FSI systems. Although these procedures are convenient, fluid mesh adjustments according to the motion and finite deformation of immersed solids or structures can be challenging or even prohibitive. Moreover, complex dynamic behaviors of coupled FSI systems are often lost in these iterative processes. In this paper, the author would like to review the so-called monolithic approaches for the solution of coupled FSI systems as a whole in the context of the immersed boundary method. In particular, the focus is on the implicit monolithic algorithm for compressible solids immersed inside a compressible liquid. Notice here the main focus of this paper is on liquid or more precisely liquid phase of water as working fluid. Using the word liquid, the author would like to emphasize the consideration of the compressibility of the fluid and the assumption of constant density and temperature. It is a common practice to assume that the pressure variations are not strong enough to alter the liquid density in any significant fashion for acoustic fluid–solid interactions problems. Although the algorithm presented in this paper is not directly applicable to aerodynamics in which the density change is significant along with its relationship with the pressure and the temperature, the author did revisit his earlier work on merging immersed boundary method concepts with a fully-fledged compressible aerodynamic code based on high-order compact scheme and energy conservative form of governing equations. In the proposed algorithm, on top of a uniform background (ghost) mesh, a fully implicit immersed method is implemented with mixed finite element methods for compressible liquid as well as immersed compressible solids with a matrix-free Newton–Krylov iterative solution scheme. In this monolithic approach, with the simple modulo function, the immersed solid or structure points can be easily located and thus the displacement projections and force distributions stipulated in the immersed boundary method can be effectively and efficiently implemented. This feature coupled with the key concept of the immersed boundary method helps to avoid topologically challenging mesh adjustments and to incorporate parallel processing commands such as Message Passing Interface (MPI) and further vectorization of the numerical operation. Once these high-performance procedures are implemented coupled with the monolithic implicit matrix-free Newton–Krylov iterative scheme with immersed methods, effective and efficient reduced order modeling techniques can then be employed to explore phase and parametric spaces. The in-house developed programs are at the moment two-dimensional. Furthermore, based on the same approach implemented in one-dimensional test example with one continuum immersed in another continuum, such monolithic implicit matrix-free Newton–Krylov iterative approach can be extended for the study of composites with deformable aggregates and matrix.