Flow simulation on moving boundary-fitted grids and application to fluid-structure interaction problems
We present a method for the parallel numerical simulation of transient three-dimensional fluid-structure interaction problems. Here, we consider the interaction of incompressible flow in the fluid domain and linear elastic deformation in the solid domain. The coupled problem is tackled by an approach based on the classical alternating Schwarz method with non-overlapping subdomains, the subproblems are solved alternatingly and the coupling conditions are realized via the exchange of boundary conditions. The elasticity problem is solved by a standard linear finite element method. A main issue is that the flow solver has to be able to handle time-dependent domains. To this end, we present a technique to solve the incompressible Navier-Stokes equation in three-dimensional domains with moving boundaries. This numerical method is a generalization of a finite volume discretization using curvilinear coordinates to time-dependent coordinate transformations. It corresponds to a discretization of the arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian formulation of the Navier-Stokes equations. Here the grid velocity is treated in such a way that the so-called Geometric Conservation Law is implicitly satisfied. Altogether, our approach results in a scheme which is an extension of the well-known MAC-method to a staggered mesh in moving boundary-fitted coordinates which uses grid-dependent velocity components as the primary variables. To validate our method, we present some numerical results which show that second-order convergence in space is obtained on moving grids. Finally, we give the results of a fully coupled fluid-structure interaction problem. It turns out that already a simple explicit coupling with one iteration of the Schwarz method, i.e. one solution of the fluid problem and one solution of the elasticity problem per time step, yields a convergent, simple, yet efficient overall method for fluid-structure interaction problems. Copyright (c) 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
fluid-structure interaction navier-stokes equations finite volume discretization geometric conservation law moving boundary fitted grids arbitrary lagrangian-eulerian method