Characterization of the forcing and sub-filter scale terms in the volume-filtering immersed boundary method

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the sub-filter scale terms in the volume-filtering immersed boundary method, demonstrating their dependence on filter size and showing that finer filters reduce the need for SFS modeling while maintaining accuracy.

Contribution

It provides a detailed numerical analysis of the SFS terms in the VF-IB method and establishes their scaling behavior with filter size, highlighting when modeling is necessary.

Findings

VF-IB exhibits second order convergence as filter size decreases.

SFS term scales quadratically with filter size.

Finer filters allow ignoring SFS terms without losing accuracy.

Abstract

We present a characterization of the forcing and the sub-filter scale terms produced in the volume-filtering immersed boundary (VF-IB) method by Dave et al, JCP, 2023. The process of volume-filtering produces bodyforces in the form of surface integrals to describe the boundary conditions at the interface. Furthermore, the approach also produces unclosed subfilter scale (SFS) terms. The level of contribution from SFS terms on the numerical solution depends on the filter width. In order to understand these terms better, we take a 2 dimensional, varying coefficient hyperbolic equation shown by Brady & Liverscu, JCP, 2021. This case is chosen for two reasons. First, the case involves 2 distinct regions seperated by an interface, making it an ideal case for the VF-IB method. Second, an existing analytical solution allows us to properly investigate the contribution from SFS term for varying filter sizes. The latter controls how well resolved the interface is. The smaller the filter size, the more resolved the interface will be. A thorough numerical analysis of the method is presented, as well as the effect of the SFS term on the numerical solution. In order to perform a direct comparison, the numerical solution is compared to the filtered analytical solution. Through this, we highlight three important points. First, we present a methodical approach to volume filtering a hyperbolic PDE. Second, we show that the VF-IB method exhibits second order convergence with respect to decreasing filter size (i.e. making the interface sharper). Finally, we show that the SFS term scales with square the filter size. Large filter sizes require modeling the SFS term. However, for sufficiently finer filters, the SFS term can be ignored without any significant reduction in the accuracy of solution.