An Explicit Modeling Approach for Simulating Fluid-Structure Interaction Problems With Immersed-Boundary Finite-Volume Method

Abstract Fluid-structure interaction (FSI) is an important fundamental problem with wide scientific and engineering applications. The immersed boundary method has proved to be an effective way to model the interaction between a moving solid and its surrounding fluid. In this study, a novel modeling approach based on the coupled immersed-boundary and finite-volume method is proposed to simulate fluid-structure interaction problems. With this approach, the whole computational domain is treated as fluid and discretized by only one set of Eulerian grids. The computational domain is divided into solid parts and fluid parts. A goal velocity is locally determined in each cell inside the solid part. At the same time, the hydrodynamic force exerted on the solid structure is calculated by integrating along the faces between the solid cells and fluid cells. In this way, the interaction between the solid and fluid is solved explicitly and the costly information transfer between Lagranian grids and Eulerian grids is avoided. The interface is sharply restricted into one single grid width throughout the iterations. The proposed modeling approach is validated by conducting several classic numerical experiments, including flow past static and freely rotatable square cylinders, and sedimentation of an ellipsoid in finite space. Throughout the three numerical experiments, satisfying agreements with literatures have been obtained, which demonstrate that the proposed modeling approach is accurate and robust for simulating FSI problems.