Analysis of Fluid-Structure Interaction by Means of Dynamic Unstructured Meshes

This paper presents a computational analysis on forced vibration fluid-structure interaction in compressible flow regimes. A so-called staggered approach is pursued where the fluid and structure are integrated in time by distinct solvers. Their interaction is then taken into account by a coupling algorithm. The unsteady fluid motion is simulated by means of an explicit time-accurate solver. For the fluid-structure interaction problems which are considered here the effects due to the viscosity can be neglected. The fluid is hence modeled by the Euler equations for compressible inviscid flow. Unstructured grids are used to discretise the fluid domain. These grids are particularly suited to simulate unsteady flows over complex geometries by their capacity of being dynamically refined and unrefined. Dynamic mesh adaptation is used to enhance the computational precision with minimal CPU and memory constraints. Fluid-structure interaction involves moving boundaries. Therefore the Arbitrary Lagrange Euler method (ALE-method) is adopted to solve the Euler equations on a moving domain. The deformation of the mesh is controlled by means of a spring analogy in conjunction with a boundary correction to circumvent the principle of Saint Venant. To take advantage of the differences between fluid and structure time scales, the fluid calculation is subcycled within the structural time step. Numerical results are presented for large rotation, pitching oscillation and aeroelastic motion of the NACA0012 airfoil. The boundary deformation is validated by comparing the numerical solution for a flat plate under supersonic flow with the analytical solution.

Fluid-structure interaction for vascular flows: From supercomputers to laptops

Claudia Maria Colciago, Simone Deparis, Davide Forti

Several models exist for the simulation of vascular flows; they span from simple circuit models to full three-dimensional ones that take into account detailed features of the blood and of the arterialwall. Eachmodel comeswith both benefits and drawbacks, the main denominator being a compromise between detailed resolution requirements versus computational time. We first present a fluid-structure interaction computationalmodelwhere both the fluid and the structure are three dimensional. In particular, the fluid includes modeling of large eddies by the variationalmultiscalemethod. After time and space discretizations carried out by finite differences and finite elements, respectively, we set up a parallel solver based ondomain decomposition and a FaCSI preconditioner. These simulations allow one to capture details of the flow dynamics and of the structure deformation even in the transitional regime characterizing hemodynamics in the aorta. It takes roughly 10 hours to complete a simulation of one heartbeat with 35 million degrees of freedom on 2048 cores. We then reduce both the model and its numerical complexity. The structural model is simplified to a two-dimensional membrane located at the fluid-structure interface and the fluid computational domain is fixed. For a fixed geometry andmesh, these assumptions allow one to apply proper orthogonal decomposition and generate a space discretization which has only a few dozen degrees of freedom. It is then possible to perform the simulation of one heartbeat on a laptop in less than one second. Themodeling and numerical reduction therefore allows a dramatic reduction of computational time. However, the price to pay comes, on the one hand, in terms of the preparation of a reduced basis specific to the patient and the geometry of the vessel and, on the other hand, with a detriment of certain quantities of interest. For example, when using a finite element discretization with 9 million degrees of freedom, the offline part takes about 12 hours on 720 cores for the example provided in this work; in this case, the flow profiles in the aorta are pretty close to the full three-dimensional

De Gruyter2017

MATHICSE Technical Report : FaCSI : A block parallel preconditioner for fluid-structure interaction in hemodynamics

Simone Deparis, Davide Forti, Gwenol Grandperrin, Alfio Quarteroni

Modeling Fluid-Structure Interaction (FSI) in the vascular system is mandatory to reliably compute mechanical indicators in vessels undergoing large deformations. In order to cope with the computational complexity of the coupled 3D FSI problem after discretizations in space and time, a parallel solution is often mandatory. In this paper we propose a new block parallel preconditioner for the coupled linearized FSI system obtained after space and time discretization. We name it FaCSI to indicate that it exploits the factorized form of the linearized FSI matrix, the use of static condensation to formally eliminate the interface degrees of freedom of the fluid equations, and the use of a SIMPLE preconditioner for saddle-point problems. FaCSI is builtupon a block Gauss-Seidel factorization of the FSI Jacobian matrix and it uses ad-hoc preconditioners for each physical component of the coupled problem, namely the fluid, the structure and the geometry. In the fluid subproblem, after operating static condensation of the interface fluid variables, we use a SIMPLE preconditioner on the reduced fluid matrix. Moreover, to efficiently deal with a large number of processes, FaCSI exploits efficient single field preconditioners, e.g., based on domain decomposition or the multigrid method. We measure the parallel performances of FaCSI on a benchmark cylindrical geometry and on a problem of physiological interest, namely the blood flow through a patient-specific femoropopliteal bypass. We analyse the dependence of the number of linear solver iterations on the cores count (scalability of the preconditioner) and on the mesh size (optimality).

MATHICSE2015

Numerical analysis of axisymmetric flows and methods for fluid-structure interaction arising in blood flow simulation

Simone Deparis

In this thesis we propose and analyze the numerical methods for the approximation of axisymmetric flows as well as algorithms suitable for the solution of fluid-structure interaction problems. Our investigation is aimed at, but are not restricted to, the simulation of the blood flow dynamics. The first part of this work deals with an axisymmetric fluid model based on three-dimensional incompressible Stokes or Navier–Stokes equations which are solved on a two-dimensional half-section of the domain under consideration. In particular we show optimal a priori error estimates for P1isoP2/P1 axisymmetric finite elements for the steady Stokes equations under the assumption that the domain and the data are axisymmetric and that the data have no angular component. Our analysis is carried out in the framework of weighted Sobolev spaces and takes advantage of a suitably defined Cl´ement type projection operator. We then introduce an axisymmetric formulation of the Navier–Stokes equations in moving domains and, starting from existing results in three-dimensions, we set up an Arbitrary Lagrangian–Eulerian (ALE) formulation and prove some stability results. In the second part, we deal with algorithms for the solution of fluid-structure interaction problems. We introduce the problem in a generic form where the fluid is described by means of incompressible Navier–Stokes equations and the structure by a viscoelastic model. We account for large deformations of the structure and we show how existing algorithms may be improved to reduce the computational time. In particular we show how to use transpiration boundary conditions to approximate the fluid-structure problem in a fixed point strategy. Moreover, in a quasi-Newton strategy we reduce the cost by replacing the Jacobian with inexact Jacobians stemming from reduced physical models for the problem at hand. To speed up the convergence of the Newton algorithm, we also define a dynamic preconditioner and an acceleration scheme which have been successfully tested in haemodynamics simulations in two and three dimensions.