A high‐order solver for simulating vortex‐induced vibrations using the sliding‐mesh spectral difference method and hybrid grids

Abstract

SummaryWe present a high‐order solver for simulating vortex‐induced vibrations (VIVs) at very challenging situations, for example, VIVs of a row of very closely placed objects with large relative displacements. This solver works on unstructured hybrid grids by employing the high‐order tensor‐product spectral difference method for quadrilateral grids and the Raviart‐Thomas spectral difference method for triangular grids. To deal with the challenging situations where a traditional conforming moving mesh is incapable, we split a computational domain into nonoverlapping subdomains, where each interior subdomain encloses an object and moves freely with respect to its neighbors. A nonuniform sliding‐mesh method that ensures high‐order accuracy is developed to deal with sliding interfaces between subdomains. A monolithic approach is adopted to seamlessly couple the fluid and solid vibration equations. Moreover, the solver is parallelized to further improve its efficiency on distributed‐memory computers. Through a series of numerical tests, we demonstrate that this solver is high‐order accurate for both inviscid and viscous flows and has good parallel efficiency, making it ideal for VIV studies.