A Fully Coupled Formulation For Incompressible Fluid-Elastic Structure-Interactions

Abstract

We present a general formulation for analysis of fluid flows with structural interactions using the particle finite element method (PFEM). The fluids are fully coupled to the structures that can undergo highly non-linear response due to large deformations. The key feature of the PFEM is the use of an updated Lagrangian description to model the motion of nodes(particles) in both the fluid and the structure domains. A mesh connects the nodes defining the discretized domains where the governing equations, expressed in an integral form are solved as in the standard FEM. A fractional step scheme for the transient coupled fluid-structure solution is described. Examples of application of the PFEM method to solve a number of fluidstructure interaction problems including free-fluid-surfaces, breaking waves and fluid particle separation may be easily solved with this formulation are presented.