An efficient parallel computation of unsteady incompressible viscous flow with elastic moving and compliant boundaries on unstructured grids

Abstract

This paper presents the development and validation of a parallel unstructured-grid fluid–structure interaction (FSI) solver for the simulation of unsteady incompressible viscous flow with long elastic moving and compliant boundaries. The Navier–Stokes solver on unstructured moving grid using the arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian formulation is based on the artificial compressibility approach and a high-order characteristics-based finite-volume scheme. Both unsteady flow and FSI are calculated with a matrix-free implicit dual time-stepping scheme. A membrane model has been formulated to study fluid flow in a channel with an elastic membrane wall and their interactions. This model can be employed to calculate arbitrary wall movement and variable tension along the membrane, together with a dynamic mesh method for large deformation of the flow field. The parallelization of the fluid–structure solver is achieved using the single program multiple data programming paradigm and message passing interface for communication of data. The parallel solver is used to simulate fluid flow in a two-dimensional channel with and without moving membrane for validation and performance evaluation purposes. The speedups and parallel efficiencies obtained by this method are excellent, using up to 16 processors on a SGI Origin 2000 parallel computer. A maximum speedup of 23.14 could be achieved on 16 processors taking advantage of an improved handling of the membrane solver. The parallel results obtained are compared with those using serial code and they are found to be identical. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.