Embedded Boundary Method

Abstract

The application of Computational Fluid Dynamics to model and simulate flows around flexible and moving objects has grown in the last decades fueled by new technological challenges in particular in the aerospace engineering field because of the introduction of highly deformable materials and complex moving systems. Existing body-fitted mesh methods such as the Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian (ALE) approach have been proposed to simulate the flow around moving and deforming structures but their applicability is limited because of the issues arising in deforming the computational grid constrained to the moving/deforming structure. This thesis focuses on the verification, and validation of an Embedded Boundary method (developed at Stanford University by Prof. Farhat research group) for the solution of fluidstructure interaction problems involving large and complex structural motions and deformations. The Embedded Boundary method works on non-body fitted grids, by using a tracking algorithm is able to impose the effects of an ’immersed’ moving and deforming surface mesh on the fixed Eulerian fluid mesh. For this reason this method is gaining popularity because it simplify a number of issues ranging from codes coupling (fluid-structure solvers) to formulating and implementing algorithms for applications that involve very large and complex motions-deformations and for which ALE algorithms are unfeasible.