Stochastic Eulerian Lagrangian methods for fluidstructure interactions with thermal fluctuations
We present approaches for the study of fluidstructure interactions subject to thermal fluctuations. A mixed mechanical description is utilized combining Eulerian and Lagrangian reference frames. We establish general conditions for operators coupling these descriptions. Stochastic driving fields for the formalism are derived using principles from statistical mechanics. The stochastic differential equations of the formalism are found to exhibit significant stiffness in some physical regimes. To cope with this issue, we derive reduced stochastic differential equations for several physical regimes. We also present stochastic numerical methods for each regime to approximate the fluidstructure dynamics and to generate efficiently the required stochastic driving fields. To validate the methodology in each regime, we perform analysis of the invariant probability distribution of the stochastic dynamics of the fluidstructure formalism. We compare this analysis with results from statistical mechanics. To further demonstrate the applicability of the methodology, we perform computational studies for spherical particles having translational and rotational degrees of freedom. We compare these studies with results from fluid mechanics. The presented approach provides for fluidstructure systems a set of rather general computational methods for treating consistently structure mechanics, hydrodynamic coupling, and thermal fluctuations.
stochastic eulerian lagrangian method fluidstructure interaction thermal fluctuations statistical mechanics fluid dynamics fluctuating hydrodynamics selm