Pressure boundary conditions for immersed-boundary methods

Abstract

Immersed boundary methods have seen an enormous increase in popularity over the past two decades, especially for problems involving complex moving/deforming boundaries. In most cases, the boundary conditions on the immersed body are enforced via forcing functions in the momentum equations, which in the case of fractional step methods may be problematic due to: i) creation of slip-errors resulting from the lack of explicitly enforcing boundary conditions on the (pseudo-)pressure on the immersed body; ii) coupling of the solution in the fluid and solid domains via the Poisson equation. Examples of fractional-step formulations that simultaneously enforce velocity and pressure boundary conditions have also been developed, but in most cases the standard Poisson equation is replaced by a more complex system which requires expensive iterative solvers. In this work we propose a new formulation to enforce appropriate boundary conditions on the pseudo-pressure as part of a fractional-step approach. The overall treatment is inspired by the ghost-fluid method typically utilized in two-phase flows. The main advantage of the algorithm is that a standard Poisson equation is solved, with all the modifications needed to enforce the boundary conditions being incorporated within the right-hand side. As a result, fast solvers based on trigonometric transformations can be utilized. We demonstrate the accuracy and robustness of the formulation for a series of problems with increasing complexity.