A remeshed vortex method for mixed rigid/soft body fluid--structure interaction

TL;DR

This paper presents a 2D remeshed vortex method algorithm for simulating fluid-structure interactions involving mixed rigid and soft bodies, demonstrating accuracy, versatility, and efficiency across various complex scenarios.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel 2D algorithm combining remeshed vortex method with a one-continuum formulation for efficient fluid-structure interaction simulation of mixed rigid and soft bodies.

Findings

Achieves first to second order convergence in space and time.

Successfully simulates complex phenomena like muscular actuation and self propulsion.

Robustly handles diverse constitutive models and boundary conditions.

Abstract

We outline a 2D algorithm for solving incompressible flow--structure interaction problems for mixed rigid/soft body representations, within a consistent framework based on the remeshed vortex method. We adopt the one--continuum formulation to represent both solid and fluid phases on an Eulerian grid, separated by a diffuse interface. Rigid solids are treated using Brinkman penalization while an inverse map technique is used to obtain elastic stresses in the hyper-elastic solid phase. We test our solver against a number of benchmark problems, which demonstrate physical accuracy and first to second order convergence in space and time. Benchmarks are complemented by additional investigations that illustrate the ability of our numerical scheme to capture essential fluid--structure interaction phenomena across a variety of scenarios involving internal muscular actuation, self propulsion, multi-body contact, heat transfer and rectified viscous streaming effects. Through these illustrations, we showcase the ability of our solver to robustly deal with different constitutive models and boundary conditions, solve disparate multi-physics problems and achieve faster time-to-solutions by sidestepping CFL time step restrictions.