Development of a New Interfacing Strategy for Fluid-Structure Interaction

Displacement and pressure transfer between fluid and structure meshes in fluidstructure interaction analysis is complicated substantially when the two meshes on the domain interface are different and therefore form two distinct surfaces in three-dimensional space. A new, approximately energy-conserving interfacing strategy with two distinct components - mapping and interpolation - is proposed. The mapping between meshes is based on the assumption of a common parametric-based description of the wetted surface. The interpolation strategy is based on the smoothing element analysis method developed to recover stresses in finite element analysis, with an additional term to impose an energy-conserving constraint. The method is evaluated numerically with several examples from linear hydrodynamics/hydroelasticity. The advantage of these examples is that the components can be evaluated separately, and the performance of the method can be examined more clearly. Numerical results show the method is quite promising.