An efficient finite-volume method to study the interaction of two-phase fluid flows with elastic structures

Martinez-Ferrer, Pedro J, Qian, Ling, Ma, Zhihua, Causon, Derek and Mingham, Clive (2018) An efficient finite-volume method to study the interaction of two-phase fluid flows with elastic structures. Journal of Fluids and Structures, 83. pp. 54-71. ISSN 0889-9746

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Abstract

We introduce a fluid–structure interaction (FSI) framework for the resolution of two-phase fluid flow problems and isothermal non-linear elastic bodies. The discretisation of both the fluid and solid governing equations relies exclusively on the finite volume method. A strong coupling partitioned approach is implemented to ensure the two-way coupling of information between the fluid and solid regions defined in the simulation. Moreover, this FSI framework is integrated on top of a multi-region coupling procedure developed in companion papers [Martínez-Ferrer et al. (2016, 2018)], which has been successfully applied in numerical wave tanks (NWTs), and shown to work transparently with standard domain decomposition techniques used in parallel simulations. Therefore, this retained approach results in a high performance computing strategy to carry out accurate and efficient FSI simulations of wave impacts against structures characteristic of ocean and coastal engineering problems. We conduct a series of test cases to verify the implementation of this FSI framework and its parallel performance for an increasing number of CPU cores. These benchmarks include the dynamic and static responses of cantilever and clamped beams under various loads, a lid-driven flow in an elastic cavity, the water entry of an elastic wedge and, finally, a water dam impact on an elastic plate. The results obtained in this work agree well with analytical solutions, laboratory measurements as well as other numerical simulations reported in the literature.