Simulation of Fluid-Structure Interaction Using Voxel Method

Abstract

A Voxel grid method combined with cut cells has been developed for simulating two-dimensional unsteady, viscous, and incompressible flows with arbitrary boundaries. The volume of fluid (VOF) approach based on finite volume method (FVM) is employed to accurately discretize the governing equation in Voxel cells that are cut by irregular boundaries. The precision of solution in the cut cells is ensured by special discretizations near the embedded boundaries. The accuracy and robustness of the proposed method are validated by simulating viscous flow around a stationary cylinder. Moreover, in order to verify the ability of this method to simulate the flow fields with arbitrarily moving boundaries, the fluid-structure interaction of bluff body in forced oscillation and vortex-induced vibration are also investigated by employing Voxel method developed in this paper, Calculation results show that lock-in phenomenon in wind engineering, in which the vortex-shedding is synchronized with the vibration of cylinder, is consistent with experimental data, the cylinder resonance state caused by vortex-induced vibration is also in reasonable agreement with results calculated by Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian (ALE) finite element method (FEM)