A Mass Conservative Scheme for Fluid–Structure Interaction Problems by the Staggered Discontinuous Galerkin Method

Abstract

In this paper, we develop a new mass conservative numerical scheme for the simulations of a class of fluid–structure interaction problems. We will use the immersed boundary method to model the fluid–structure interaction, while the fluid flow is governed by the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations. The immersed boundary method is proven to be a successful scheme to model fluid–structure interactions. To ensure mass conservation, we will use the staggered discontinuous Galerkin method to discretize the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations. The staggered discontinuous Galerkin method is able to preserve the skew-symmetry of the convection term. In addition, by using a local postprocessing technique, the weakly divergence free velocity can be used to compute a new postprocessed velocity, which is exactly divergence free and has a superconvergence property. This strongly divergence free velocity field is the key to the mass conservation. Furthermore, energy stability is improved by the skew-symmetric discretization of the convection term. We will present several numerical results to show the performance of the method.