Amin Kolahdouz’s paper, A sharp interface Lagrangian-Eulerian method for rigid-body fluid-structure interaction, has been accepted to appear in Journal of Computational Physics. (A preprint is available on the arXiv.) This paper introduces a new sharp interface method to simulate fluid-structure interaction (FSI) involving rigid bodies immersed in viscous incompressible fluids by substantially extending Amin’s earlier work on immersed interface methods for discrete surfaces.
We refer to the numerical approach developed in this paper as an immersed Lagrangian-Eulerian (ILE) method. This ILE method integrates aspects of partitioned and immersed FSI formulations: it solves separate momentum equations for the fluid and solid subdomains, as in a partitioned formulation, while also using non-conforming discretizations of the dynamic fluid and structure regions, as in an immersed formulation.
An important aspect of the methodology is that, at least for all of the tests considered so far, it does not appear to suffer from so-called added mass effect instabilities. Indeed, tests suggest that it is capable of treating models with extremely small, nearly equal, equal, and large solid-fluid density ratios. The question of whether the ILE method does or does not suffer from the added mass effect awaits future analytical studies.
We are looking forward to future extensions and applications of this exciting new approach to FSI.
Congratulations, Amin!