A generalized minimal residual method-based immersed boundary-lattice Boltzmann flux solver coupled with finite element method for non-linear fluid-structure interaction problems

A generalized minimal residual method (GMRES) based immersed boundary-lattice Boltzmann flux solver (IB-LBFS) coupled with the finite element method (FEM) is presented in this paper for nonlinear fluid-structure interaction (FSI) problems. This approach effectively combines LBFS for the simulation of the flow field, the total Lagrangian FEM for the evaluation of nonlinear structural deformations, and the immersed boundary method (IBM) for the exchange of information on the fluid-solid interface and implementation of boundary conditions. Both the multidirect forcing and the implicit IBM are considered to examine their effects on numerical accuracy and efficiency. Through numerical simulations on flow past a cylinder, it is shown that the implicit IBM with the GMRES for the linear equation system is more efficient and accurate, which justify the conventional misunderstanding that implicit IBM is always less efficient than explicit methods. Numerical simulations on the lid-driven cavity flow in an inclined cavity, incompressible flows of a uniformly accelerated vertical plate, and the flow induced vibrations of a beam attached behind a cylinder in a channel are also successfully carried out and the obtained results are in good agreement with the published data, which verify the reliability and flexibility of the proposed solver for simulating nonlinear FSI problems. After that, the external flows past two hyperelastic cylinder-beam structures at the Reynolds number of 40–300 are studied and three different modes of static, linear, and nonlinear deformations of the beam are obtained, demonstrating its capability of simulating flows with nonlinear FSI problems with multiple deformable objects.