An interface preserving and residual-based adaptivity for phase-field modeling of fully Eulerian fluid-structure interaction

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel interface preserving and residual-based adaptivity procedure for the phase-field modeling of a fully Eulerian fluid-structure interaction. The proposed adaptive fully Eulerian procedure involves a fixed background unstructured finite element mesh on which the fluid-structure boundary is treated implicitly via a diffused interface description. We employ the stabilized finite element formulation and a partitioned iterative procedure to solve the coupled system of the Allen-Cahn phase-field equation with the unified momentum equation comprising solid and fluid dynamics. To evaluate the solid stresses, the left Cauchy-Green deformation tensor is convected at each time step to trace the evolution of the solid strain in the Eulerian reference frame. We utilize a residual based error indicator and the newest vertex bisection algorithm for the adaptive refinement/coarsening of the unstructured mesh. Through the adaptive finite element method, we aim to preserve the profile of the diffused interface in the presence of convective distortion. We propose an early stopping criterion for the adaptivity of the interface dynamics by combining the effects of the phase-field interface thickness parameter and the mesh resolution. In addition, we control the size of the refined/coarsened elements by introducing a characteristic length scale governed by a weighted harmonic mean of the desired bulk and the interface mesh resolutions. The proposed stopping criterion and the characteristic length scale provide significant reductions in the computational cost while simultaneously ensuring convergence properties of the coupled fluid-structure system. We perform a detailed convergence and accuracy analysis via two benchmark problems namely, the pure solid system and a coupled fluid-solid system with an interface in a rectangular domain. We further provide a comparative study between feature- and residual based adaptive strategies. We systematically assess the performance of the adaptive procedure in terms of conservation properties and computational efficiency. Finally, we demonstrate our fully Eulerian adaptive solver to simulate the contact and bouncing phenomenon between an elastic solid and a rigid wall.