Falling balls in a viscous fluid with contact: Comparing numerical simulations with experimental data

Abstract

We evaluate a number of different finite-element approaches for fluid–structure (contact) interaction problems against data from physical experiments. This consists of trajectories of single particles falling through a highly viscous fluid and rebounding off the bottom fluid tank wall. The resulting flow is in the transitional regime between creeping and turbulent flows. This type of configuration is particularly challenging for numerical methods due to the large change in the fluid domain and the contact between the wall and the particle. In the finite-element simulations, we consider both rigid body and linear elasticity models for the falling particles. In the first case, we compare the results obtained with the well-established Arbitrary Lagrangian–Eulerian (ALE) approach and an unfitted moving domain method together with a simple and common approach for contact avoidance. For the full fluid–structure interaction (FSI) problem with contact, we use a fully Eulerian approach in combination with a unified FSI-contact treatment using Nitsche's method. For higher computational efficiency, we use the geometrical symmetry of the experimental setup to reformulate the FSI system into two spatial dimensions. Finally, we show full three-dimensional ALE computations to study the effects of small perturbations in the initial state of the particle to investigate deviations from a perfectly vertical fall observed in the experiment. The methods are implemented in open-source finite element libraries, and the results are made freely available to aid reproducibility.