Computation of Fluid and Rigid Body Interaction Using a New Immersed Finite Element Method

Abstract

A new method to simulate fluid-structure interaction is proposed based on the immersed Finite Element Method (iFEM), where no additional external volume force is required to account for the structure-to-fluid interaction. The incompressible fluid equations are written in the Arbitrary Eularian-Lagrangian (ALE) framework, allowing the arbitrary motion of the mesh nodes, whereas the solid motion is written in the Lagrangian viewpoint and represented by an additional 2-dimensional solid mesh carried out by the fluid flow. A Smooth Heaviside function is used to define properties across the entire domain. Present test cases show promising results when compared to standard benchmarks, especially considering the simplicity of the proposed formulation to simulating fluid-solid multiphase flows.