Chapter 11 - Mixed finite element–computational fluid dynamics method for nonlinear fluid–solid interactions

Abstract

The application of finite element (FE) methods (FEM) in solid structural analysis and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to describe fluid flows have achieved increased sophistication and success in recent years. How to combine this well-developed FEM for structures and the powerful CFD approaches for fluids in order to deal with nonlinear fluid–solid interaction (FSI) problems is discussed in this chapter. We call this numerical approach simulating nonlinear fluid–structure interaction problems as a mixed FE–CFD method. The benefit of this mixed method is effectively using the available powerful commercial software for FEM and CFD to simulate complex nonlinear FSI problems in engineering.