FSI

(Fluid Structure Interaction)

 In fluid-structure interaction (FSI) problems, one or more solid structures interact with an internal or surrounding fluid flow. FSI problems play prominent roles in many scientific and engineering fields, yet a comprehensive study of such problems

remains a

challenge due to their strong nonlinearity and

multidisciplinary nature. For most FSI problems, analytical solutions to the model equations

are impossible to obtain, whereas laboratory experiments are limited

in scope; thus to investigate the fundamental physics involved in the complex interaction between fluids and solids, numerical simulations may be employed.
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 The fluid mechanics is the branch of science which discusses the fluid flow behaviour, governed by Partial Differential Equations (PDE) which represent conservation laws for the mass, momentum and energy. With the invent of digital computers, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) came into existence which is an art of replacing such PDE systems by sets of algebraic equations and solve them numerically with appropriate numerical methods. Structural mechanics is another discipline of Engineering in which the deformation or displacement of solid materials are analytically studied and material laws and a wide range of dynamical properties modelled. Moreover, the computational structural mechanics (CSM)

has also achieved a great advance independently from the CFD.

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In almost every physical system, interactions between movable or deformable structures with internal or external fluid flow can be observed. This behaviour is known in literature as fluid-structure interaction (FSI) and has been one of the most investigated and most intensively studied coupled problems.

The significant applications in various areas considering an elastic or inelastic structure surrounded by or conveying a fluid can be found in the following broad engineering disciplines: Aerodynamics Aero elasticity Civil engineering

Biomechanics
Hemodynamic Meteorological phenomena Hydro elasticity
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 The numerical procedures to solve these FSI problems may be broadly classified into two approaches:

the monolithic approach and the partitioned approach.

It is understood that the distinction between the monolithic and partitioned approaches may be viewed differently by researchers from different fields

The monolithic approach treats the fluid and structure dynamics in the same mathematical framework to form a single system equation for the entire problem, which is solved simultaneously by a unified algorithm. The interfacial conditions are implicit in the solution procedure. This approach can potentially achieve better accuracy for a multidisciplinary problem, but it may require substantially more resources and expertise

to develop and maintain such a specialized code.

The partitioned approach treats the fluid and the structure as two computational fields which can be solved separately with their respective mesh discretization and numerical algorithm. The interfacial conditions are used explicitly to communicate information between the fluid and structure solutions. A motivation of the later approach is to integrate available disciplinary (i.e., fluidic and structural) algorithms and reduce the code development time by

taking advantage of the legacy codes or numerical algorithms that

have been validated and used for solving many complicated fluid or structural problems.

Another general classification of the FSI solution procedures is based

upon the treatment of meshes:

the conforming mesh methods and non-conforming mesh methods.

The distinction between these two types of meshes can be observed in Fig. 2, where a solid body (a sphere) is moving in a fluid domain. Most of the partitioned approach-based numerical works reviewed in this article are the conforming mesh methods (see Section 3), whereas the immersed methods that perhaps represent most of the recent developments in FSI methods are the non-conforming mesh methods

The conforming mesh methods consider the interface conditions as

physical boundary conditions, which treat the interface location as part of the solution, and requires meshes that conform to the interface. Owing to the movement and/or deformation of the solid structure, remeshing (or mesh-updating) is needed as the solution is advanced.

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The non-conforming mesh methods treat the boundary location and the related interface conditions as constraints imposed on the model equations so that non-conforming meshes can be employed. As a result, the fluid and solid equations can be conveniently solved independently from each other with their respective grids, and remeshing is not necessary.

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One of the most important Monolithic approaches is ALE which means Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian method. Since it is most used in commercial and also open source softwares, we are going to review this method here. The theoretical investigation of the fluid structure interaction problems is complicated by the need of mixed description. While for the solid part the natural view is the material (Lagrangian)

description for the fluid it is the spatial (Eulerian) description. In the

case of their combination some kind of mixed description (usually referred to as the arbitrary LagrangianEulerian (ALE) description)

has to be used which brings additional nonlinearity into the

resulting equations.
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There are two main domains: Fluid domain and structural domain, the common interface is

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Fluid structure interaction problem formulation Based on ALE method

Undeformed (original) and deformed (current) configurations.

Flow between thick elastic walls

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Structural Domain
Displacement and Velocity

Mass and Momentum Balance

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Fluid Domain
Displacement Mapping in the fluid domain mush be sufficiently smooth

Mass and Momentum Balance

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The interaction is due to the exchange of momentum through the common part of the boundary On this part we require that the

forces are in balance and simultaneously the no slip boundary condition holds for the fluid

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The remaining external boundary conditions can be of the following kind. A natural boundary condition on the fluid inflow and outflow part

Alternatively we can prescribe a Dirichlet type boundary condition

on the inflow or outflow part

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The Dirichlet boundary condition is prescribed for the solid displacement at the part

The stress free boundary condition for the solid is applied at the part

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both fields are continuous across the interface and we can define global

quantities on

as the deformation gradient and its determinant.

Now we transform the equations to the fixed initial region by the mapping:

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It remains to prescribe some relation for the mapping

.we formulate

some simple relation together with the Dirichlet boundary conditions:

The complete set of the equations can be written as:

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With the initial conditions

and boundary conditions

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 At last, in order to solve the balance equations we need to specify the constitutive relations for the stress tensors for both domains. We non-dimensionalize all the quantities by a given characteristic length L and speed V. In order to solve the problem we have to create a discrete approximation which can be subsequently solved numerically. The discretization must be both for time and space.

The discretization in space can be done by the finite element

method.

Now every thing is ready to solve a FSI problem numerically.

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References:
1) Wang, X., " Fundamental of fluid-solid interactions, Analytical and computational approaches." Elsevier, 2008. 2) Mudassar, R., " Finite element simulation techniques for incompressible fluid-structure interaction with applications to bioengineering and optimization ", phD thesis, Dortmund University, 2011. 3) Gene Hou, Jin Wang, and Anita T. Layton, Numerical methods for fluid-structure interaction a review, Comm Comput Phys, vol. 12 (2012), pp. 337-377 . 4) Hron, J. and M. Ma k, Fluid-structure interaction with dli applications in biomechanics. Nonlinear Analysis: Real World Applications, 2007. 8(5): p. 1431-1458.

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