A consistent mixed-dimensional coupling approach for 1D Cosserat beams and 2D surfaces in 3D space

Abstract: The present article proposes a novel computational method for coupling arbitrarily curved 1D fibers with a 2D surface as defined, e.g., by the 2D surfaces of a 3D solid body or by 2D shell formulations. The fibers are modeled as 1D Cosserat continua (beams) with six local degrees of freedom, three positional and three rotational ones. A kinematically consistent 1D-2D coupling scheme for this problem type is proposed considering the positional and rotational degrees of freedom along the beams. The positional degrees of freedom are coupled by enforcing a constant normal distance between a point on the beam centerline and a corresponding point on the surface. This strategy requires a consistent description of the surface normal vector field to guarantee fundamental mechanical properties such as conservation of angular momentum. Coupling of the rotational degrees of freedom of the beams and a suitable rotation tensor representing the local orientation within a solid volume has been considered in a previous contribution. In the present work, this coupling approach will be extended by constructing rotation tensors that are representative of local surface orientations. Several numerical examples demonstrate the consistency, robustness and accuracy of the proposed method. To showcase its applicability to multi-physics systems of practical relevance, the fluid-structure interaction example of a vascular stent is presented.