An enhanced Immersed Structural Potential Method for fluid-structure interaction

Within the group of immersed boundary methods employed for the numerical simulation of fluid-structure interaction problems, the Immersed Structural Potential Method (ISPM) was recently introduced (Gil et al., 2010) [1] in order to overcome some of the shortcomings of existing immersed methodologies. In the ISPM, an incompressible immersed solid is modelled as a deviatoric strain energy functional whose spatial gradient defines a fluid-structure interaction force field in the Navier-Stokes equations used to resolve the underlying incompressible Newtonian viscous fluid. In this paper, two enhancements of the methodology are presented. First, the introduction of a new family of spline-based kernel functions for the transfer of information between both physics. In contrast to classical IBM kernels, these new kernels are shown not to introduce spurious oscillations in the solution. Second, the use of tensorised Gaussian quadrature rules that allow for accurate and efficient numerical integration of the immersed structural potential. A series of numerical examples will be presented in order to demonstrate the capabilities of the enhanced methodology and to draw some key comparisons against other existing immersed methodologies in terms of accuracy, preservation of the incompressibility constraint and computational speed.