ϕ-FEM: an optimally convergent and easily implementable immersed boundary method for particulate flows and Stokes equations

Abstract

We present an immersed boundary method to simulate the creeping motion of a rigid particle in a fluid described by the Stokes equations discretized thanks to a finite element strategy on unfitted meshes, called ϕ-FEM, that uses the description of the solid with a level-set function. One of the advantages of our method is the use of standard finite element spaces and classical integration tools, while maintaining the optimal convergence (theoretically in the H1 norm for the velocity and L2 for pressure; numerically also in the L2 norm for the velocity).