Fluid-Rigid Body Interaction by PETSc-FEM Driven by Python

Abstract

Fluid structure interaction (FSI) involving rigid bodies contains three main problems to be solved, the computational fluid dynamics (CFD), the computational mesh dynamics (CMD) and the multi-body dynamics (MBD). Python is used as a glue language capable of connecting this three main problems in a high-level, interactive and productive environment. This interaction is implemented in PETSc-FEM code(http://www.cimec.org.ar/petscfem) which is a parallel multi-physics finite element based on PETSc. PETSc is a suite of data structures and routines for the scalable solution of scientific applications modeled by partial differential equations. It employs the MPI standard for all message-passing communication. PETSc for Python (petsc4py) are Python bindings for PETSc used in this work.
A stabilized ALE (Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian) formulation is used to solve the incompressible laminar Navier Stokes equations in a moving grid. The mesh dynamics may be solved in general by a global optimization strategy, however, in some special cases, a simple ad-hoc procedure may be adopted. For each subproblems a second order accurate in
time scheme is adopted. Results for vortex-induced vibrations (VIV), galloping and flutter of some numerical examples at low Reynolds number are presented.