FICTITIOUS DOMAIN METHOD FOR NUMERICAL SIMULATION OF INCOMPRESSIBLE VISCOUS FLOW AROUND RIGID BODIES

This article describes the method of efficient simulation of the flow around potentially many rigid obstacles. The finite element implementation is based on the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations using structured, regular, two dimensional triangular mesh. The fictitious domain method is introduced to account for the presence of rigid particles, representing obstacles to the flow. To enforce rigid body constraints in parts corresponding to rigid obstacles, Lagrange multipliers are used. For time discretization, an operator splitting technique is used. The model is validated using 2D channel flow simulations with circular obstacles. Different possibilities of enforcing rigid body constraints are compared to the fully resolved simulations and optimal strategy is recommended.