FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS OF NON-LINEAR FLUID STRUCTURE INTERACTION IN HYDRODYNAMICS USING MIXED LAGRANGIAN-EULERIAN METHOD

Abstract

Fluid structure Interaction (FSI) is important in analysis of: (1) Cardio-vascular dynamics; (2) Underwater/ Offshore structures; (3) Aircraft wings and turbine blade designs; (4) Design of tall structures/buildings; (5) high speed hard disk drives etc. At present, such capabilities are being incorporated, if any, only to a limited extent in commercial CFD codes leaving the engineers to develop their own codes. In the current study, a hydro-elastic problem of an underwater structure has been considered. Traditionally, the hydrodynamics and the structural dynamics are solved using finite difference/boundary element methods and finite element method (FEM) respectively. Moreover, the governing equation for fluid and structure are usually written in Eulerian and Lagrangian reference frames - posing further difficulties for coupling the two systems. In this research, both the fluid and structural systems are solved by the finite element method using a mixed Eulerian-Lagrangian scheme, where, fluid mesh moves and adapts to new free surface and structural positions. A full non-linear free surface implementation is considered. A mesh adaptation using Laplacian smoothing is performed to reduce the need for re-meshing the domain frequently. The scheme is validated with solutions available in the literature and extended to the present FSI problem with non-linear free surface boundary condition.