Coupling edge-based smoothed finite element method with smoothed particle hydrodynamics for fluid structure interaction problems

Abstract Numerical simulation of fluid structure interaction (FSI) problems is one of the most challenging topics in computational fluid dynamics. In this paper, coupling edge-based smoothed finite element method (ES-FEM) and smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method (ES-FEM-SPH) is proposed for solving FSI problems, where the edge-based smoothed finite element method is used to model the movement and deformation of structures, and the smoothed particle hydrodynamics is used to model the fluid flow. In ES-FEM, the gradient smoothing technique is applied over the smoothing domain and it can effectively overcome the ‘‘overly-stiff’’ effect in conventional FEM model. Some correction algorithms including density correction, kernel gradient correction and particle shift technique are integrated into the SPH method to improve computational stability and accuracy. A virtual particle coupling scheme is used to implement the coupling of ES-FEM and SPH with complex geometry interface. As ES-FEM is more accurate than conventional FEM, and it is expected that this ES-FEM-SPH coupling approach should be superior than existing FEM-SPH coupling approaches. A number of test examples with FSI are investigated with the presented ES-FEM-SPH, and compared with results from other approaches including FEM-SPH. From the obtained numerical results, we can conclude that the ES-FEM-SPH coupling approach is effective to simulate FSI problems.