Conventional Immersed Boundary Method Research Articles

An immersed boundary velocity correction method combined with virtual body-fitted grid for simulation of incompressible flows

In this work, a virtual body-fitted grid is introduced into the velocity correction-based immersed boundary method (IBM) to simulate incompressible flows. The impact of the immersed boundary is indirectly transmitted to the flow field via a virtual body-fitted grid. In this method, the fractional step technique consisting of the predictor and the corrector is adopted. The prediction step is executed on the Eulerian mesh, and the correction step is done on the virtual grid to fulfill the no-slip boundary condition. After the correction step, the corrected velocity field on the virtual grid is then assigned to that on the Eulerian mesh to update the flow field. Being able to adjust the grid spacing flexibly, the virtual body-fitted grid alleviates the shortcomings of the conventional IBM that uses the smooth Dirac delta function to associate Lagrangian points with their surrounding Eulerian points. As a result, the present method is easy to apply to non-uniform Cartesian grids, which is inapplicable to the conventional IBM with the smooth Dirac delta function. Numerical experiments concerning flow past a circular cylinder and a NACA0012 airfoil demonstrate the advantages of the present method, i.e., fewer Lagrangian points are required to avoid the streamline penetration of boundary and the range of “diffuse interface” can be narrowed by reducing the normal grid spacing of the virtual body-fitted grid to improve numerical results on a coarse mesh. In addition, an accuracy assessment on the decaying vortex problem reveals that the present IBM has a second-order accuracy.

A high-efficiency discretized immersed boundary method for moving boundaries in incompressible flows

The Immersed Boundary Method (IBM) has an advantage in simulating fluid–structure interaction, owning to its simplicity, intuitiveness, and ease of handling complex object boundaries. The interpolation function plays a vital role in IBM and it is usually computationally intensive. For moving or deforming solids, the interpolation weights of all the immersed boundary points ought to be updated every time step, which takes quite a lot CPU time. Since the interpolation procedure within all uniform structured grids is highly repetitive and very similar, we propose a simple and generalized Discretized Immersed Boundary Method (DIBM), which significantly improves efficiency by discretizing the interpolation functions onto subgrid points within each control volume and reusing a predefined universal interpolation stencil. The accuracy and performance of DIBM are analyzed using both theoretical estimation and simulation tests. The results show speedup ratios of 30–40 or even higher using DIBM when compared with conventional IBM for typical moving boundary simulations like particle-laden flows, while the error is estimated to be under 1% and can be further decreased by using finer subgrid stencils. By balancing the performance and accuracy demands, DIBM provides an efficient alternative framework for handling moving boundaries in incompressible viscous flows.

Accuracy improvement of immersed boundary-lattice Boltzmann and finite element method by iterative velocity correction

In an analysis of the fluid–structure interaction (FSI) problem, the non-slip boundary condition at solid walls cannot be accurately satisfied by the conventional immersed boundary-lattice Boltzmann coupling schemes due to insufficient interpolation accuracy. To solve this problem, an improved iterative velocity correction procedure for the immersed boundary-lattice Boltzmann coupling scheme is proposed by introducing a modified velocity operator. The particle distribution function was modified at each time step, and the evolution governing equation of the multiple relaxation time-lattice Boltzmann method was performed. A numerical framework for coupling lattice Boltzmann and finite element methods for transient problems involving FSI was established, and the iterative velocity correction immersed boundary method was used for the partitioned approach. The solid structure was discretized with the finite element method, while the single-component fluid flows were simulated with the lattice Boltzmann method. An FSI benchmark model was employed to verify the efficiency of the proposed coupling method. The results show that the developed method guarantees the non-slip boundary condition and maintains the convergence rate of the conventional immersed boundary method. In viscous flow and strong shearing flow, the accuracy of both stationary and moving solid boundaries is obviously improved.

On the Lagrangian-Eulerian coupling in the immersed finite element/difference method

The immersed boundary (IB) method is a non-body conforming approach to fluid-structure interaction (FSI) that uses an Eulerian description of the momentum, viscosity, and incompressibility of a coupled fluid-structure system and a Lagrangian description of the deformations, stresses, and resultant forces of the immersed structure. Integral transforms with Dirac delta function kernels couple the Eulerian and Lagrangian variables, and in practice, discretizations of these integral transforms use regularized delta function kernels. Many different kernel functions have been proposed, but prior numerical work investigating the impact of the choice of kernel function on the accuracy of the methodology has often been limited to simplified test cases or Stokes flow conditions that may not reflect the method's performance in applications, particularly at intermediate-to-high Reynolds numbers, or under different loading conditions. This work systematically studies the effect of the choice of regularized delta function in several fluid-structure interaction benchmark tests using the immersed finite element/difference (IFED) method, which is an extension of the IB method that uses a finite element structural discretization combined with a Cartesian grid finite difference method for the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations. Whereas the conventional IB method spreads forces from the nodes of the structural mesh and interpolates velocities to those nodes, the IFED formulation evaluates the regularized delta function on a collection of interaction points that can be chosen to be denser than the nodes of the Lagrangian mesh. This opens the possibility of using structural discretizations with wide node spacings that would produce gaps in the Eulerian force in nodally coupled schemes (e.g., if the node spacing is comparable to or broader than the support of the regularized delta function). Earlier work with this methodology suggested that such coarse structural meshes can yield improved accuracy for shear-dominated cases and, further, found that accuracy improves when the structural mesh spacing is increased. However, these results were limited to simple test cases that did not include substantial pressure loading on the structure. This study investigates the effect of varying the relative mesh widths of the Lagrangian and Eulerian discretizations in a broader range of tests. Our results indicate that kernels satisfying a commonly imposed even–odd condition require higher resolution to achieve similar accuracy as kernels that do not satisfy this condition. We also find that narrower kernels are more robust, in the sense that they yield results that are less sensitive to relative changes in the Eulerian and Lagrangian mesh spacings, and that structural meshes that are substantially coarser than the Cartesian grid can yield high accuracy for shear-dominated cases but not for cases with large normal forces. We verify our results in a large-scale FSI model of a bovine pericardial bioprosthetic heart valve in a pulse duplicator.

Modeling deformable capsules in viscous flow using immersed boundary method

This paper presents an immersed boundary method (IBM) for deformable capsules in incompressible viscous flow. Unlike the conventional IBM, the present method utilizes an unstructured mesh coupled with the moving least squares method, which improves the performance for applications involving a complex geometry. We validate our method through independent studies on oscillation and deformation of spherical capsules in viscous flow. Our simulations on a deformable capsule flowing in an elbow channel show that the capsule capillary number affects its shape and deformation area significantly. The maximum deformation area is found to be linearly proportional to the capillary number. In addition, our simulation on soft capsule sorting using a pinched flow fractionation microfluidic device shows that smaller capsules tend to migrate toward the pinched wall region before streaming out in the expansion region. The result is that smaller capsules drift closer to the center plane of the device and can be efficiently separated from the larger ones using branching. For capsule sorting applications using T-junction, we found that the fate of a capsule depends on the relative position of its center of mass and the dividing streamline. Larger capsules are diverted from the main stream toward the side outlet, leading to effective size fractionation.

An immersed interface method for discrete surfaces

Fluid-structure systems occur in a range of scientific and engineering applications. The immersed boundary (IB) method is a widely recognized and effective modeling paradigm for simulating fluid-structure interaction (FSI) in such systems, but a difficulty of the IB formulation of these problems is that the pressure and viscous stress are generally discontinuous at fluid-structure interfaces. The conventional IB method regularizes these discontinuities, which typically yields low-order accuracy at these interfaces. The immersed interface method (IIM) is an IB-like approach to FSI that sharply imposes stress jump conditions, enabling higher-order accuracy, but prior applications of the IIM have been largely restricted to numerical methods that rely on smooth representations of the interface geometry. This paper introduces an immersed interface formulation that uses only a C0 representation of the immersed interface, such as those provided by standard nodal Lagrangian finite element methods. Verification examples for models with prescribed interface motion demonstrate that the method sharply resolves stress discontinuities along immersed boundaries while avoiding the need for analytic information about the interface geometry. Our results also demonstrate that only the lowest-order jump conditions for the pressure and velocity gradient are required to realize global second-order accuracy. Specifically, we demonstrate second-order global convergence rates along with nearly second-order local convergence in the Eulerian velocity field, and between first- and second-order global convergence rates along with approximately first-order local convergence for the Eulerian pressure field. We also demonstrate approximately second-order local convergence in the interfacial displacement and velocity along with first-order local convergence in the fluid traction along the interface. As a demonstration of the method's ability to tackle more complex geometries, the present approach is also used to simulate flow in a patient-averaged anatomical model of the inferior vena cava, which is the large vein that carries deoxygenated blood from the lower and middle body back to the heart. Comparisons of the general hemodynamics and wall shear stress obtained by the present IIM and a body-fitted discretization approach show that the present method yields results that are in good agreement with those obtained by the body-fitted approach.

An Eulerian–Lagrangian–Lagrangian method for solving thin moving rigid body immersed in the fluid

It is convention in computational mechanics to use Eulerian grids for fluids and Lagrangian grids for solids. In this paper, a novel method called ELL using both Lagrangian and Eulerian grids for fluids is presented in a carefully designed manner to handle complex fluid–structure interaction (FSI) problems with moving thin rigid body. The key idea is to use a small portion of the fluid to wrap the thin body. This wrapping fluid is described in Lagrangian coordinate, the same way the solid is described. They are treated as one “composite solid” thus the immersed domain method (IDM) can be implemented. In this way, the moving interface boundary conditions can be explicitly imposed with the help of the unified Lagrangian grids in the interaction zone. The initial fluid domain can still be treated as usual Eulerian grids based on IDM theory by introducing a fictitious fluid. The FSI interface can be accurately modeled since the wrapping fluid and the solid are always attached together. This effectively solves the major “blur interface” problem in the conventional immersed boundary method (IBM). To demonstrate this ELL idea, a number of benchmark examples have been studied in comparison with the results in the open literature. Finally, a 2D flapping wing is simulated to show the potential of ELL in engineering application. It is observed that ELL method proves to be good in performance.

An Immersed Boundary method with divergence-free velocity interpolation and force spreading

The Immersed Boundary (IB) method is a mathematical framework for constructing robust numerical methods to study fluid–structure interaction in problems involving an elastic structure immersed in a viscous fluid. The IB formulation uses an Eulerian representation of the fluid and a Lagrangian representation of the structure. The Lagrangian and Eulerian frames are coupled by integral transforms with delta function kernels. The discretized IB equations use approximations to these transforms with regularized delta function kernels to interpolate the fluid velocity to the structure, and to spread structural forces to the fluid. It is well-known that the conventional IB method can suffer from poor volume conservation since the interpolated Lagrangian velocity field is not generally divergence-free, and so this can cause spurious volume changes. In practice, the lack of volume conservation is especially pronounced for cases where there are large pressure differences across thin structural boundaries. The aim of this paper is to greatly reduce the volume error of the IB method by introducing velocity-interpolation and force-spreading schemes with the properties that the interpolated velocity field in which the structure moves is at least C1 and satisfies a continuous divergence-free condition, and that the force-spreading operator is the adjoint of the velocity-interpolation operator. We confirm through numerical experiments in two and three spatial dimensions that this new IB method is able to achieve substantial improvement in volume conservation compared to other existing IB methods, at the expense of a modest increase in the computational cost. Further, the new method provides smoother Lagrangian forces (tractions) than traditional IB methods. The method presented here is restricted to periodic computational domains. Its generalization to non-periodic domains is important future work.

Numerical simulation of flows past multiple cylinders using the hybrid Local Domain Free Discretization and Immersed Boundary Method

Study of the flow around a group of cylinders (such as risers of the offshore platforms) has been the challenging subject because of its inherent complexity. The research on this problem is important because flow interference between cylinders is responsible for some significant changes in the characteristics of fluid loads. In this paper, the hybrid Local Domain-Free Discretization-Immersed Boundary Method (LDFD-IBM), which combines the strengths of LDFD method and Immersed Boundary Method (IBM), is adopted to solve this problem. The advantages of the LDFD-IBM over conventional IBM are its truly second-order accuracy and simple implementation using a regular fixed Cartesian mesh. In the present investigation, the solver has been applied to simulate the unsteady viscous flow past two cylinders and three cylinders at different configurations in a uniform cross flow. The streamlines and vorticity contours are plotted for the flow visualization. The lift and drag coefficients time histories are presented.

Comparison of Handling Pressure in Poisson Solver for Immersed Boundary Method Considering Pressure Condition

In the Cartesian grid approach, the immersed boundary method (IBM) is well used to handle the boundary of an object with complicated shape on the Cartesian grid. However, the conventional IBM generates the unphysical pressure oscillations near the boundary because of the pressure jump between inside and outside of the boundary. The IBM considering pressure condition was proposed in order to remove the pressure oscillations by solving the governing equations considering the pressure condition on the boundary. In this method, there are two ways of the handling the pressure on the boundary in the Poisson solver. In this paper, the effect of removing the pressure oscillations by the IBM considering the pressure condition is investigated. And, the influence by the difference in the handling of the pressure on the boundary in the Poisson solver is investigated. In the numerical simulations of incompressible flow around a 2D circular cylinder, the present IBM indicates a greate effect of removing the pressure oscillations. And, it does not occur difference of the result by the difference of the handling the pressure on the boundary in the Poisson solver. Therefore, it is possible to select a method with less computational amount in the Poisson solver without degrading the quality of the result. It is concluded that the present IBM is very promising as improved method in order to remove the pressure oscillations in the conventional IBM.

Accuracy improvement of the immersed boundary–lattice Boltzmann coupling scheme by iterative force correction

The non-slip boundary condition at solid walls cannot be accurately achieved by the conventional immersed boundary–lattice Boltzmann (IB–LB) coupling schemes due to insufficient interpolation accuracy. To solve this problem, an iterative force correction procedure for the IB–LB coupling scheme is proposed. Cheng’s external forcing term in the LB equation is selected to properly incorporate the present and the next time step effects. The unknown IB force and the corresponding force on fluid at the next time step are calculated by iterative correction, based on the known immersed boundary speed, flow velocity, and the relationship between the IB speed and the IB force. Instead of the Dirac delta function, the Lagrange interpolation polynomial is used to obtain the IB speed from nearby fluid velocity. Typical cases, including the flow around a circular cylinder, shearing flow near a non-slip wall, and circular Couette flow between two inversely rotating cylinders, are simulated to verify and validate the method. It is shown that the present method guarantees the non-slip boundary condition and maintain the overall first-order spatial convergence rate of the conventional immersed boundary method (IBM). The accuracy improvement is obvious for both stationary and moving solid boundaries in both viscous flows and strong shearing flows. To demonstrate application possibility, a mechanical heart valve flow is also simulated, and better agreements with experimental data are achieved compared to those by commercial software.

PIBM: Particulate immersed boundary method for fluid–particle interaction problems

It is well known that the number of particles should be scaled up to enable industrial scale simulation. The calculations are more computationally intensive when the motion of the surrounding fluid is considered. Besides the advances in computer hardware and numerical algorithms, the coupling scheme also plays an important role on the computational efficiency. In this study, a particulate immersed boundary method (PIBM) for simulating the fluid–particle multiphase flow was presented and assessed in both two- and three-dimensional applications. The idea behind PIBM derives from the conventional momentum exchange-based Immersed Boundary Method (IBM) by treating each Lagrangian point as a solid particle. This treatment enables Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) to be coupled with fine particles residing within a particular grid cell. Compared with the conventional IBM, dozens of times speedup in two-dimensional simulation and hundreds of times in three-dimensional simulation can be expected under the same particle and mesh number. Numerical simulations of particle sedimentation in Newtonian flows were conducted based on a combined LBM–PIBM–Discrete Element Method (DEM) scheme, showing that the PIBM can capture the feature of particulate flows in fluid and is indeed a promising scheme for the solution of the fluid–particle interaction problems.

A unified mathematical framework and an adaptive numerical method for fluid–structure interaction with rigid, deforming, and elastic bodies

Many problems of interest in biological fluid mechanics involve interactions between fluids and solids that require the coupled solution of momentum equations for both the fluid and the solid. In this work, we develop a mathematical framework and an adaptive numerical method for such fluid–structure interaction (FSI) problems in which the structure may be rigid, deforming, or elastic. We employ an immersed boundary (IB) formulation of the problem that permits us to avoid body conforming discretizations and to use fast Cartesian grid solvers. Rigidity and deformational kinematic constraints are imposed using a formulation based on distributed Lagrange multipliers, and a conventional IB method is used to describe the elasticity of the immersed body. We use Cartesian grid adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) to discretize the equations of motion and thereby obtain a solution methodology that efficiently captures thin boundary layers at fluid–solid interfaces as well as flow structures shed from such interfaces. This adaptive methodology is validated for several benchmark problems in two and three spatial dimensions. In addition, we use this scheme to simulate free swimming, including the maneuvering of a two-dimensional model eel and a three-dimensional model of the weakly electric black ghost knifefish.

Simulation of Incompressible Viscous Flows by Local DFD-Immersed Boundary Method

AbstractA local domain-free discretization-immersed boundary method (DFD-IBM) is presented in this paper to solve incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in the primitive variable form. Like the conventional immersed boundary method (IBM), the local DFD-IBM solves the governing equations in the whole domain including exterior and interior of the immersed object. The effect of immersed boundary to the surrounding fluids is through the evaluation of velocity at interior and exterior dependent points. To be specific, the velocity at interior dependent points is computed by approximate forms of solution and the velocity at exterior dependent points is set to the wall velocity. As compared to the conventional IBM, the present approach accurately implements the non-slip boundary condition. As a result, there is no flow penetration, which is often appeared in the conventional IBM results. The present approach is validated by its application to simulate incompressible viscous flows around a circular cylinder. The obtained numerical results agree very well with the data in the literature.

Simulation of Incompressible Viscous Flows by Local DFD-Immersed Boundary Method

A local domain-free discretization-immersed boundary method (DFD-IBM) is presented in this paper to solve incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in the primitive variable form. Like the conventional immersed boundary method (IBM), the local DFD-IBM solves the governing equations in the whole domain including exterior and interior of the immersed object. The effect of immersed boundary to the surrounding fluids is through the evaluation of velocity at interior and exterior dependent points. To be specific, the velocity at interior dependent points is computed by approximate forms of solution and the velocity at exterior dependent points is set to the wall velocity. As compared to the conventional IBM, the present approach accurately implements the non-slip boundary condition. As a result, there is no flow penetration, which is often appeared in the conventional IBM results. The present approach is validated by its application to simulate incompressible viscous flows around a circular cylinder. The obtained numerical results agree very well with the data in the literature.

A stream function-vorticity formulation-based immersed boundary method and its applications

A new stream function–vorticity formulation-based immersed boundary method is presented in this paper. Different from the conventional immersed boundary method, the main feature of the present model is to accurately satisfy both governing equations and boundary conditions through velocity correction and vorticity correction procedures. The velocity correction process is performed implicitly based on the requirement that velocity at the immersed boundary interpolated from the corrected velocity field accurately satisfies the nonslip boundary condition. The vorticity correction is made through the stream function formulation rather than the vorticity transport equation. It is evaluated from the firstorder derivatives of velocity correction. Two simple and efficient ways are presented for approximation of velocity-correction derivatives. One is based on finite difference approximation, while the other is based on derivative expressions of Dirac delta function and velocity correction. It was found that both ways can work very well. The main advantage of the proposed method lies in its simple concept, easy implementation, and robustness in stability. Numerical experiments for both stationary and moving boundary problems were conducted to validate the capability and efficiency of the present method. Good agreements with available data in the literature were achieved. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Immersed Boundary-Lattice Boltzmann Coupling Scheme for Fluid-Structure Interaction with Flexible Boundary

AbstractCoupling the immersed boundary (IB) method and the lattice Boltzmann (LB) method might be a promising approach to simulate fluid-structure interaction (FSI) problems with flexible structures and complex boundaries, because the former is a general simulation method for FSIs in biological systems, the latter is an efficient scheme for fluid flow simulations, and both of them work on regular Cartesian grids. In this paper an IB-LB coupling scheme is proposed and its feasibility is verified. The scheme is suitable for FSI problems concerning rapid flexible boundary motion and a large pressure gradient across the boundary. We first analyze the respective concepts, formulae and advantages of the IB and LB methods, and then explain the coupling strategy and detailed implementation procedures. To verify the effectiveness and accuracy, FSI problems arising from the relaxation of a distorted balloon immersed in a viscous fluid, an unsteady wake flow caused by an impulsively started circular cylinder at Reynolds number 9500, and an unsteady vortex shedding flow past a suddenly started rotating circular cylinder at Reynolds number 1000 are simulated. The first example is a benchmark case for flexible boundary FSI with a large pressure gradient across the boundary, the second is a fixed complex boundary problem, and the third is a typical moving boundary example. The results are in good agreement with the analytical and existing numerical data. It is shown that the proposed scheme is capable of modeling flexible boundary and complex boundary problems at a second-order spatial convergence; the volume leakage defect of the conventional IB method has been remedied by using a new method of introducing the unsteady and non-uniform external force; and the LB method makes the IB method simulation simpler and more efficient.

SIMULATION OF INCOMPRESSIBLE VISCOUS FLOWS BY BOUNDARY CONDITION-IMPLEMENTED IMMERSED BOUNDARY METHOD

A new numerical approach is presented in this work to simulate incompressible flows. The present approach combines the ideas of the conventional immersed boundary method (IBM) for decoupling the solution of governing equations with the solid boundary and the local domain-free discretization (DFD) method for implementation of boundary conditions. Numerical results for simulation of flows around a circular cylinder showed that the present approach can provide accurate solutions effectively.

Stochastic immersed boundary method incorporating thermal fluctuations

AbstractWe give a brief introduction to the stochastic immersed boundary method which allows for simulation of small length‐scale physical systems in which elastic structures interact with a fluid flow in the presence of thermal fluctuations. The conventional immersed boundary method is extended to account for thermal fluctuations by introducing stochastic forcing terms in the fluid equations. This gives a system of stiff SPDE's for which standard numerical approaches perform poorly. We discuss a numerical method derived using stochastic calculus to overcome the stiff features of the equations. We then discuss results which indicate that the method captures physical features predicted by statistical mechanics for small length‐scale systems. The stochastic immersed boundary method holds promise as a numerical approach in simulating microscopic mechanical systems in which thermal fluctuations play a fundamental role. A more detailed discussion of this work is given in [1, 2, 3]. (© 2008 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)

A novel immersed boundary velocity correction–lattice Boltzmann method and its application to simulate flow past a circular cylinder

A novel immersed boundary velocity correction–lattice Boltzmann method is presented and validated in this work by its application to simulate the two-dimensional flow over a circular cylinder. The present approach is inspired from the conventional immersed boundary method (IBM). In the conventional IBM, the effect of rigid body on the surrounding flow is modeled through a forcing term, which is in turn used to correct the surrounding velocity field. It was found that this process is actually an iterative procedure, trying to satisfy the non-slip boundary condition at the solid wall. In this work, a new concept of immersed boundary velocity correction approach is proposed, which directly corrects the velocity to enforce the physical boundary condition. The main advantage of the new method is that it is simple in concept and easy for implementation, and the convergence of numerical computation is faster and more stable than the conventional IBM. One challenging issue of conventional IBM is that some streamlines may pass through the solid body since there is no mechanism to enforce the non-slip condition at the boundary. As shown in the present numerical results, this unphysical phenomenon is avoided in our new method since the non-slip condition is enforced. The present results for the steady and unsteady flows compare very well with available data in the literature.