Stochastic Eulerian Lagrangian Methods for Fluid-Structure Interactions with Thermal Fluctuations

TL;DR

This paper introduces stochastic Eulerian-Lagrangian methods for simulating fluid-structure interactions with thermal fluctuations, providing reduced models and numerical techniques validated through statistical mechanics and fluid mechanics comparisons.

Contribution

It develops a unified stochastic formalism combining Eulerian and Lagrangian descriptions, derives reduced equations for different regimes, and offers efficient numerical methods validated against theoretical and fluid mechanics results.

Findings

Validated stochastic models against statistical mechanics.

Demonstrated methods with spherical particle simulations.

Provided computational tools for fluid-structure systems with thermal fluctuations.

Abstract

We present approaches for the study of fluid-structure interactions subject to thermal fluctuations. A mixed mechanical description is utilized combining Eulerian and Lagrangian reference frames. We establish general conditions for operators coupling these descriptions. Stochastic driving fields for the formalism are derived using principles from statistical mechanics. The stochastic differential equations of the formalism are found to exhibit significant stiffness in some physical regimes. To cope with this issue, we derive reduced stochastic differential equations for several physical regimes. We also present stochastic numerical methods for each regime to approximate the fluid-structure dynamics and to generate efficiently the required stochastic driving fields. To validate the methodology in each regime, we perform analysis of the invariant probability distribution of the stochastic dynamics of the fluid-structure formalism. We compare this analysis with results from statistical mechanics. To further demonstrate the applicability of the methodology, we perform computational studies for spherical particles having translational and rotational degrees of freedom. We compare these studies with results from fluid mechanics. The presented approach provides for fluid-structure systems a set of rather general computational methods for treating consistently structure mechanics, hydrodynamic coupling, and thermal fluctuations.