Efficient Immersed Boundary Method for Strong Interaction Problem of Arbitrary Shape Object with the Self-Induced Flow

Abstract

An immersed boundary method is improved and applied to 2-D flow fields involving a single stationary/moving object. The present immersed boundary method employs a body force proportional to a solid volume fraction for coupling the solid and fluid motions at the interface. A hyperbolic-tangent function is newly introduced as a surface digitiser for computing the volume fractions at the interface cells, and this improvement is proved to be efficient for problems involving arbitrary shape object. The present method is applied to a uniform flow field around a circular cylinder and an interaction problem of fluid and free-falling object. The computational results are found to agree with the results by the different methods of the present authors and the results reported in the literatures. Also the computation time is considerably cut down compared to the other methods by the series of improvements to the immersed boundary method.

Keywords

• immersed boundary method
• fluid-solid interaction
• non-spherical object
• surface digitiser
• computational fluid dynamics