A versatile sharp interface immersed boundary method for incompressible flows with complex boundaries

• Published in: Journal of computational physics Vol. 227; no. 10; pp. 4825 - 4852
• Main Authors: Mittal, R., Dong, H., Bozkurttas, M., Najjar, F.M., Vargas, A., von Loebbecke, A.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Amsterdam Elsevier Inc 01-05-2008; Elsevier
• Subjects: Body non-conformal grid methods; Computational fluid dynamics; Computational techniques; Exact sciences and technology; Ghost-cell; Immersed boundary method; Mathematical methods in physics; Physics; Body non-conformal grid methods; Immersed boundary method; Computational fluid dynamics; Ghost-cell; Incompressible flow; Three dimensional flow; Reynolds number; Boundary conditions; Calculation; Viscous flow; Calculation methods
• ISSN: 0021-9991; 1090-2716
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jcp.2008.01.028

A sharp interface immersed boundary method for simulating incompressible viscous flow past three-dimensional immersed bodies is described. The method employs a multi-dimensional ghost-cell methodology to satisfy the boundary conditions on the immersed boundary and the method is designed to handle highly complex three-dimensional, stationary, moving and/or deforming bodies. The complex immersed surfaces are represented by grids consisting of unstructured triangular elements; while the flow is computed on non-uniform Cartesian grids. The paper describes the salient features of the methodology with special emphasis on the immersed boundary treatment for stationary and moving boundaries. Simulations of a number of canonical two- and three-dimensional flows are used to verify the accuracy and fidelity of the solver over a range of Reynolds numbers. Flow past suddenly accelerated bodies are used to validate the solver for moving boundary problems. Finally two cases inspired from biology with highly complex three-dimensional bodies are simulated in order to demonstrate the versatility of the method.