A structured adaptive mesh refinement strategy with a sharp interface direct-forcing immersed boundary method for moving boundary problems

Abstract

We develop a versatile and accurate structured adaptive mesh refinement (S-AMR) strategy with a moving least square sharp-direct forcing immersed boundary method (IBM) for incompressible fluid-structure interaction (FSI) simulations. The computational grid consists of several nested blocks in different refinement levels. While blocks with the coarsest grid cover the entire computational domain, the computational domain is locally refined at the location of solid boundary (moving or fixed) by bisecting selected blocks in every coordinate direction. The grid topology and data structure is managed by an extended version of Afivo toolkit (Teunissen and Ebert, 2018), where a novel technique is introduced for conservative data transfer between the coarser and the finer blocks, particularly in velocity transformation for which the mass conservation plays a crucial role. In the present study, the continuity and Navier-Stokes equations for incompressible flows are spatially discretized with a second order central finite difference method using a collocated arrangement and are time-integrated using a semi-implicit second order fractional step method, although the proposed S-AMR strategy can be used with different discretization schemes. An IBM using a moving least square approach is utilized to impose boundary conditions. To handle FSI problems, all the governing equations for the dynamics of fluid and structure are simultaneously advanced in time by a predictorcorrector strategy. Several test cases of increasing complexity are solved in order to demonstrate the robustness and accuracy of the proposed method as well as its capability in simulation-driven mesh adaptivity.