Fluid Structure Interaction modelling using Lattice Boltzmann and Volume Penalization method

Abstract: This paper proposes an approach combining the Volume Penalization (VP) and the the Lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) to compute fluid structure interaction involving rigid bodies. The method consists in adding a force term in the LBM formulation, and thus considers the rigid body similar to particular porous media. Using a characteristic function for the solid domain avoids the expensive tracking of the fluid-solid interface employed commonly in LBM to treat FSI problems. The method is applied to three FSI problems and solved using a Graphics Processor Units (GPU) device. The applications focus on the capacity of the method to compute the drag and lift coefficients for various cases : the imposed displacement of a cylinder, the particle sedimentation at a very low Reynolds number and the VIV of a cylinder in a transverse fluid flow. For all cases the VP-LBM approach yields results which are in a good agreement with those of literature.