An overset boundary condition-enforced immersed boundary method for incompressible flows with large moving boundary domains

Abstract

Conventional immersed boundary methods (IBMs) have greatly simplified the boundary condition treatment by interpreting boundaries as forces in the source terms of governing equations. In conventional IBMs, uniform meshes of very high resolution must be applied near the immersed boundary to treat the solid–fluid interface. However, this can induce a high computational cost for simulating flows with large moving boundary domains, where everywhere along the trajectory of the moving object must be refined isotropically. In the worst scenario, a global refinement is required when the object is moving arbitrarily in the entire computational domain. In this work, an overset boundary condition-enforced immersed boundary method (overset BC-enforced IBM) is proposed to simulate incompressible flows with large moving boundary domains efficiently. In the proposed overset BC-enforced IBM, a locally refined uniform mesh is applied and fixed on the moving object to account for the local motions, e.g., the rotation and deformation of the object, while the global motion of the object is handled by embedding the locally refined mesh in a coarser background mesh. Both the local mesh and the global background mesh can be generated automatically using the Cartesian approach to avoid the cumbersome boundary treatment. Since the mesh refinement is local, considerable computational savings can be achieved. The overset BC-enforced IBM is combined with the lattice Boltzmann flux solver to simulate various fluid–structure interaction problems with rigid and deformable boundaries.